The Falls
by menme
Summary: House flees Princeton for secret reasons and ends up in a small town with secrets of its own, where he falls in love with a woman doctor and holds the key to a murder. A crossover. M rating is for sex.
1. Chp1 The Wind in the Firs Says One Thing

¦lt;/p

A/N: This started as a sort of personal prompt – find the craziest crossover for House I could think of and knew well enough to write about. If you're not familiar with the other series, you may not get as much out of it, but I hope it will be fun anyway –and there is an OFC in there for all you shippers (and for me!)

**The Falls **

Chapter 1 (_The Wind in the Firs Says One Thing_)

On to the next patient. Bang through the door.

He stopped short.

"You're new here," the patient said.

Please, not a chatty one. Not with what she carried in her arms.

"I bet you say that to every man under fifty," he told her. The woman was dumpy, either fifty-five or much older, with a smell about her of the backwoods. Undergrowth and shadows. He had not encountered her before, which was saying a lot in this hole-in-the-road microtown he had run to.

"If you want me to examine you, you're going to have to put that down. Actually I've been in your lovely town for about five months now." He watched her cross the room and gently deposit the stump of log she cradled onto the diaper-changing pad. "Months that are getting longer by the second."

Her problem, she told him, was that she had begun to sleep too well. It worried her.

He studied the sun through the window. Why, _why_ did he get the crazies? "If we weren't in the middle of nowhere, I could score you some meth that would ensure you never sleep again."

She leaned in, conspiratorial. "I've been informed" - she indicated her log – "that the whole town has been sleeping too well lately. It's a sign of bad things to come."

These things they said, always almost making sense. Yes, it was a sleepy town. A deranged town, from what he had seen since settling into its life. An oracle lady with a divining log (in lieu of a divining rod, he assumed) was all it had been missing. He wondered for the fiftieth time why he'd left Princeton, and then he remembered.

She was watching him, with the same glassy intent she had displayed since the moment he walked in. He caned his way to the side table and jotted down a prescription for an anti-depressant.

"Yours has grown up." She was looking at his cane. The chill of her gaze walked fingers across his skin. There is sun outside, he thought, look at it. Don't start thinking that what they say makes any sense. "Almost all grown up." Just write the scrip and get her out. She had risen to retrieve her own piece of wood from the diaper pad and cradled it close. "Mine never will, you know."

Back out into the main hall of the hospital, the comfort of fluorescent lights, nurses busy behind their desk. The weird ones had never bothered him before, not like this, his skin itching to get away from the woman behind him in the clinic room. It was the town, he told himself, hunched at the edge of its vast forest, alive-asleep.

Amalie Parker, the resident pediatrician, studied a file at the counter next to him. He could smell her scent, honey or sage. She had her hair up in its usual loose bun, its red gleam like glowing embers. Yes, that was definitely warmth creeping back into him. Knowing the pediatrician would overhear (a schoolboy tactic he hated himself for resorting to) he asked the nurse behind the desk, loudly, if she'd noticed anything unusual in the behavior of the patient she'd just assigned him. She said she hadn't.

"Log handbags just the norm around here? I do admit, her case has me _stumped_."

Dr. Parker caught on while the nurses were still frowning at him. "You've met our log lady," she surmised, turning.

"Oh I knew she had a title." He tried not to grin at her - the nurses were still watching – but gorgeous was gorgeous, you could fight the adrenaline surge when a woman as porcelain-beautiful as Amalie Parker smiled at you or just let your tongue loll out like a dog's, because it didn't matter. His schoolboy hormones would do what they wanted.

"Margaret's harmless," she told him. She leaned away from him across the counter to return the file and her blouse slid against her shoulder to reveal a bit of white bra. He stared down at it. Like a slap of intimacy, that sliver of white strap peeking out. A piece of her privacy (and she was very private, he knew), revealed to him. His reaction was so strong and instant he had to clutch his cane to keep his hand from reaching up and touching it. No longer just warm; he was hot for her. It shouldn't have turned him on like that, it was a bra, for christ-sake, and he was a doctor, but of course it wasn't the bra, it was the thought of what the bra held, that truly amazing set of knockers, if he could be forgiven for being crude (and he knew he could). Her hand came up to adjust the blouse and she turned. Either she knew why he glanced away quickly or she didn't.

"Tell me log lady owns a lumberyard and that's just her way of advertising," he said.

"No, she's just a harmless – and childless – woman with a log for a baby." For a moment the pediatrician looked sad.

Childless herself, he knew. Amalie Parker, at thirty-eight still very single, unless the entire town was not in on something. And very private.

The nurse was handing him a new file. "I'm – uh – taking a break," he told her. Dr. Parker's hands beside his on the counter grew slow. "Half an hour." He walked off.

Which was of course never long enough. He stopped by his office, giving her time, and when he was sure no one was watching him, slipped down the deserted hall to the south wing. The janitor-closet door was already open a wedge.

She had her blouse off, ready for him. Intense, efficient Dr. Amalie Parker. Porcelain skin incongruous now against the background of mops and shelves of cleaner. He crossed to her and she whispered, teasing, in his ear. "You have half an hour, Dr. House." He took his time working the bra straps off her shoulders, lifting the heavy breasts from their cups, perfect aureoles, moving his hands down to the tiny waist, flat tummy, while she groaned, then her skirt was on the floor. She never let her hair down for him, swearing the nurses would notice it had been put up differently, but strands fell from the bun now, red snakes against her shoulders. Her lips were on his, yes, her scent was sage today, and some flower with no name, the flower of a woman's sweet sweat when she was in heat. His erection pressing against her panties was painful but oh first things first. He kneeled, awkward among the brooms and mops joined now by his cane, and she leaned back against the cluttered shelves to thrust her hips toward him. Peeling those little lace things down: this was kneeling in a church, the only religion he could ever go for. She cried out when she came, making it a whimper so no on would hear (so private), then they were taking up the position that was the only one they'd found to work because of his leg – a clumsy half-lean against the plastic-lined trash barrel, hardly enough support for his thrusts when they got going and oh they were urgent today, his lips everywhere they could bend to and still keep his cock in her – shoulders, hair, the topmost swell of her breasts. He moaned her name (not Emily as he'd misunderstood from the nurses' talk back at the beginning and which she had swiftly corrected, just a French-Canadian mommy with unusual spelling habits). _Amalie_. It drove her wild, she'd told him once, (the one time during their sessions that she had talked of how she felt; the syllables when spoken by his mouth, she'd said, were like a French kiss). She clutched him. He thought he would explode. His leg was on fire as his weight shifted to it, but it didn't matter, only his thrusts, the slap of them against her skin – and then they slipped. She was thrown against him. Brooms clattered to the floor, grotesquely loud. They froze, adrenaline shock turning their veins to ice. Waiting to see if someone would fling the door open on them. He had one hand out on a shelf edge, holding both their weights, his arm trembling, but it was in the tip of his cock now, his whole being, a swollen roiling tide made stronger by the thrill that they might be discovered (which he wouldn't have cared about, always her choice to keep it in the dark) and then he couldn't hold back, jabbing it deep into her, crying out, while more objects fell around them and they stumbled from one hold to another. He came and came, thinking it would never end. Not wanting it to. Finally it was over. He felt himself go fuzzy inside her, felt her shuddering breaths against his chest. They stood at a crazy angle against the shelf wall, half the items in the place on the floor around them, and it struck him as it always did when they had finished one of their sessions, the insanity of it, that twinge of sadness in knowing that she was too ashamed of him to go public with it.

He put his mouth to her ear. "If I start acting like I've got a broom up my ass, it's because I do."

She pulled away to look at him, laughing softly, but with that wide-eyed gaze of astonishment she always had afterward, as though she never expected to get pleasure out of it.

"Dr Gregory House." She played with the hairs on his chest, past the two buttons she'd managed to get open before they'd gone at it. "On intimate terms with the inside of a janitor's closet. If the world only knew."

"It's more like the closet is on intimate terms with the inside of me." He stood erect roughly and they began to collect their clothes. It really was insane. Two months of scurried closet sex, humping like rats in a corner, because she wanted it kept that way. He retrieved his cane, tried to restack some of the brooms and mops and gave up.

"Look, Amalie." She turned. She was buckling her bra in the back, breasts pushed out toward him. She waited. "I'd like you to come over to my place for dinner this week." The words felt like mush in his mouth. She was already closing up, face tensed, tossing her blouse on with one swing and buttoning it.

"Why?" she asked, not looking. "You're getting good at doing it standing up."

"Oh I don't know." He should have known she wouldn't accept. "How about: it's time to come out of the closet." Behind the hardness in her green eyes there was the faintest touch of panic. He'd never pushed the issue before. "Come on, Am. You must be getting tired of doing it on trash. Ok_ay_, that came out wrong." More than wrong; her lips were pressed in a hard line. Maybe she liked trash. "Honestly?" He made his voice as unjoking as he could and she stopped buttoning her shirt to look at him. "I'm starting to associate the smell of your clit with that of a dirty mop. And I don't want that."

She stared at him for a long time, then approached and placed her hands on his chest. He could have reached up and loosened her hair, longed to see it fall around her. Maybe that was the sole reason he wanted her over, to see her let that hair down for him for once.

"I'll let you do it to me somewhere else," she said, "if you'll tell me what you're running from." She'd asked it before, half-joking. He'd always refused to talk about his former life, just following her lead. "Why did you leave a good job in New Jersey to come all the way out here to nowhere, Greg?"

"Okay, confession time. I killed someone."

She was already turning away in disgust, her joker in the closet just not serious enough for her. He caught her hand and wouldn't let it go. "Friday," he insisted, and to his utter surprise she was nodding. "But Thursday," she murmured. "I – can't Friday."

He was cheering inside, almost speechless. "I'm – uh – over at –"

"I know where you live, Greg."

"I'll make my special lasagna," he promised. "Famous with every biowaste disposal company in Princeton."

She smiled. _Look at the sun_. "I'll make sure I stop by the diner to fill up beforehand. About seven?" He nodded.

And when she left, checking the hall first for watchers as she always did, she glanced back at him, a lost despairing look, as though she'd done something she'd sworn to herself she never would.

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The insane town he had run to became, at night, a closet of its own: windswept, huge with quiet, all its streets like natural features in a deserted landscape, promontories against the wild sea of trees at its edge. A closet with dimensions reaching up into the dark. He left his apartment over the Haywards' garage to pick up some beer, too stubborn to take the car in case someone saw him, having jettisoned his old life so thoroughly that most of those around him did not know the degree of his pain, only that he was addicted. No longer the flaunter. So it was hoof it, or rather cane it, only a block over to Lubovsky's Wines, and it gave him time to steep himself in the dark town. Lubovsky looked like a lumberjack or a bear, but he knew his stuff. Tell him you needed a wine by tomorrow for a special woman and you would have a bottle in your hands, a varietal you'd never heard of. "You take this South African," the slow Canadian accent would say. "She's a beauty." _Yes she is_. He paid and back out on the street felt the bite of winter coming. Odd half-dead town, born of the need for wood, for trees, killing them for a living. There was no reason for him to be there; driving across the country, fleeing Princeton as fast as he could once the decision had been made, he had had no notion of stopping anywhere ever again, had simply kept on driving west until he could go no further without being in another country or falling off into the ocean, which in this case had turned out to be Puget Sound. Seattle too big for him, he had turned back, into the Washington woods, where the towns were like dents in the forest, until the first hospital he walked into said they would hire him if his credentials turned out all right. Which they had, the internet sufficing - once he asked them not to call Princeton directly – to prove his worth as a renowned doctor, all articles on his skills, techniques he had developed etcetera, but of course nothing about the way he acted, no jerk-org under which his name might have been listed. Meaning he had the chance to start over, be a different person, which he blew the first week when a patient's husband questioned his wife's radical treatment and they had a shouting match that extended from his new office all the way out the hospital door and garnered the stunned silence of the entire ground floor, including the hospital pediatrician Dr. Amalie Parker. No, there was a reason he didn't want them calling Princeton. Aside from his having mailed a letter of resignation somewhere in Montana, no one at home could know where he was, though he imagined Wilson trying frantically to find out; he would hear a knock on the door of the tiny garage apartment he had rented from the clinic GP Dr. Hayward and answer it expecting the oncologist's hang-dog face only to find Hayward's teenage daughter Donna sent by her parents to ask if he would like to join them for dinner.

Walking kept him sane. Pushing past the pain, he might halt, as he did now, and feel the wind always present in the tops of firs at the end of the park suddenly – inexplicably – go still, he was the only thing alive in the town, in the state perhaps, and that was good, then the stoplight at the main intersection would change from green to red, stopping no one on streets always empty by ten, the only life in sight a blue Mustang pulling away around the corner, its owner's face a blur of ugly, his hair long gray strands, the car peeling away _screeech_ and then he was alone again. The breeze starting back up as though, having been held back, it had to be furious now. Yes, the traffic lamp twisting there in the wind told him where he was. Stopped, in the middle of life.

You couldn't be lost if you were nowhere to start with.

He didn't even know where he stood with Amalie Parker. Gorgeous, red-headed Dr. Parker, whom he had seen around the hospital the first few months, a nodding acquaintance from when she worked the main clinic the same times he did, until the day she stepped into his office and asked for help in diagnosing a case, a nine-year old boy with dystonia – DYT1 as it turned out. He'd done little other than to establish that fact and recommend deep-brain stimulation, and when the father, a logger bozo with less smarts than a chainsaw, rejected the treatment because it would mean implanting a chip in his kid's head and weren't no government gonna control his boy, he simply pulled one of his usual gags to convince dad it was okay, something that would have gone unremarked in Princeton, and yet Dr. Parker had been deeply impressed. She had stopped by his office in the evening to thank him. A mirage in a white coat and china-doll skin, coalescing in his door. "That was amazing – I wanted to thank you."

"No need. It was fun." And he had almost blown it, waiting until she was turning away, almost out the door, that little smile still on her lips, before saying: "Do you – uh – like coffee?" She turned back, almost startled. "I mean I do. I thought we might like it together after work." _Groan_. "I mean, like _coffee_. Together. Down at the inn." He felt about fifteen. "If you like." And her lips had parted slightly, incredulous at probably the clumsiest date invitation she had ever heard.

"Sounds fine. When are you off?"

_Couldn't_ have been her accepting. "Well, some say I'm off all the time. My rocker, the deep end. The metaphors vary." He realized he was babbling. "My personal favourite is that I'm missing a few strings on my guitar."

Her smile had become a deep-throated chuckle.

"I put the 'fun' in dysfunctional."

"How about I meet you here at six, Dr. House."

"That would be good."

And coffee had turned into dinner three nights later. She insisted he pick her up near the park, though he knew she lived in one of the trendier apartments downtown. He had already sounded out old Will Hayward on her, who assured him – if that was the right word – that Amalie Parker had been out at least once with every available man in town since her arrival six years before, and, discounting those men who liked to lie about their conquests, had slept with each of them exactly once ("Always right there in the car apparently – nowhere else") before dropping them. Not good prospects. Dinner was amazingly relaxed; he'd lost the knack of conversation since his infarction, or so he thought, but every subject led to another. Simple. He loved her deep-throated laugh. He talked a little about his past, noting that she did not, then it was on to a bar until the waitress came to say they were closing, and they drove around until they found themselves gazing up through his quickly fogging windshield at the brute force of the natural wonder that dominated the town's image, the huge rushing Snoqualmie Falls. Yellow floodlights from the Great Northern Hotel behind it cast the rising mist in an eerie glow.

"First Woman and First Man were created here by Moon the Transformer."

"Come again."

"It's a legend of the Snoqualmie tribe," she told him. "The falls was a traditional burial site. The mists carried their prayers to their creator. A connection between heaven and earth."

"If there's any connection to heaven in this town, I haven't found it." _Other than your angel face_. "You seem to know a lot. You get around." It came out wrong and she grew silent.

"I don't know what someone's told you, Greg," she finally said. "I don't - get asked out that often."

"Because men are in awe of you." A beautiful woman had told him that once, that men always assumed they had no chance with her and didn't even try. From her look she knew it was true. "Ah, I'm right."

"Now and then one screws up his courage and asks. You're the first in months to go for it." Her look turned teasing. "Even if your sentences had too many 'likes' in them."

He couldn't take his eyes off her. "Do these men who 'screw up' their courage and ask you out also get up the chutzpah to make a pass at you?"

Almost a whisper. "Some do, some don't."

And he had looked at her for a long time, then moved toward her, hesitant, - not recalling the last time he'd been hesitant about anything – and kissed her.

Lips so hot he felt burned, kissing him back, wanting, and yet – cold. As if it were all impersonal, let's try this, oh very nice, but nothing more. Holding back some part of herself.

Sex had become only a notion since he'd left Princeton. He knew he could have had some easily if he'd wanted, every town had its hookers, there was supposedly a place up north on the border, but the idea of whores had begun to turn him off. It had been his choice to live like a monk since settling in. And like a monk, too long deprived, his body now responded. He wanted her to know that, wanted to wrap her around him right there – what had Hayward said, that she liked it in the car? – but there was that hesitancy in him again, something in the classy cold veneer she erected around herself. He'd never been a grabber anyway, but he wanted her to know, so he found her hand blindly, as they kissed with eyes closed, and placed it on his hardening cock.

She let it rest there a moment, then lifted it away, gentle, and pulled back from him. "It's too early," she murmured.

"It's two a.m."

"You know what I mean. Fist date and all that."

"Mmmh, technically our second." But he offered to drive her home, really home, saying that he refused to drop her off at the deserted park where she'd left her car, arguing that it was dangerous, until she told him he could watch her get in and drive off. Cold, and private.

After the date she didn't speak to him for a week.

He'd done something wrong, he decided, or hadn't done enough. She was a troller anyway, if the stories were true, just tossing out her trot line and if she didn't like whatever bit, it got thrown back in. He told himself it didn't matter. If he was stupid enough to have started falling in love with a beautiful woman he got what he deserved. Yet there was that knot, knocking at the pit of his stomach when they passed in the hall, her smile and "Hi" warm enough but with that fake-preoccupied flurry that made it clear she didn't want to talk to him, and he would turn back, hesitating, searching for something to say just that second too long, while she disappeared through a door, his lack of confidence shocking him so much he hardly recognized himself in the mirror in the mornings, until the day he stood just behind her at the front desk while she explained to a father whose daughter had fallen out of a tree that the girl's concussion meant she should stick to her bed the next few days.

The guy's wife had wandered off toward the door with their kid. The dad's face, he saw over Dr. Parker's shoulder – a rough workingman face, blond buzzcut, broad shoulders – had changed to a leer the moment his wife left, his voice gradually – oddly – becoming a mixture of insinuation and threat.

"Stick to her bed?" he was saying now, smiling at the pediatrician. "That the only advice you can give, doctor?" He emphasized _doctor_ as though it were a joke. "You know a lot about sticking to beds, huh?"

Shock flooded through him. He felt like punching the guy, big or not. Maybe the stories Hayward had told were public domain, but it didn't give the logfucker the right to practically call her a slut to her face. And amazingly she wasn't defending herself, just fumbling at the stethoscope around her neck, not meeting the guy's eyes. Classy, confident Amalie Parker, shrinking before his eyes.

"You work at the sawmill, don't you?" There went his mouth. Amalie turned, startled to find him there. Asshole looked confused, then nodded. (At least his powers of observation weren't failing him, his guess about the dusty smell had been right). "You'd be a good participant for a study I'm conducting." At the narrowed look: "For a small compensation, of course."

The confusion turned to a gleam. "What would I got to do?"

"Nothing hard. Eat, walk, talk. All the daily things."

"Why? What you studying?"

"We're testing the functionality of people who have sawdust for brains." Beside him he felt her head lift, the breath leave her. "For instance, how long it takes for someone like you to realize you've been insulted. One...two…three –"

"You goddamn –" But the guy's wife was suddenly at his side, and whatever goddamn thing he was he would never know, because they turned to leave. He waited for the guy's angry look back, yes, there it came, and then he turned to face Amalie, only to find she was halfway down the hall, having left without a word. So he could do nothing right, apparently. She had called an hour later and asked him to meet her in one of the operating rooms on the second floor, to come alone, and he'd ridden up in the elevator, his heart feeling dragged down to the basement, expecting to be chewed out now and told to stay out of her business, so that it was a surprise – surprise too small a word for it – to find her waiting for him across the empty room stark naked.

Big jutting breasts, a schoolboy's dream, tapering waist above a bush one shade darker than the hair on her head. Auburn, they called it. Eyes so wide and intent.

"Close the door." He obeyed. Unable to move closer for a moment, confusing her. "And tell me you're not gay."

Then he had recovered from the shock – admirably, he thought. "The kiss should have told you that." She kept her eyes on him as he hooked his cane over the metal head of a gurney and drew it in front of the door, then hobbled to her. "Actually, I'd rather show you I'm not."

He'd had lots of sex in hospital rooms in his day, but not for years; the sight of her naked body where naked bodies always were, as he perched her on the edge of the operating bed, yet so much more alive, her cry when he entered her that was joy instead of pain, left him breathless with the beauty of it, the contrast: pulsing warm skin against the chrome surroundings, against the cabled contraptions, silent now, built to tell whether a patient was alive when all he needed to know he was alive was _this_ this wondrous sweaty thing they did the slap of their skin her moans the rush of their laughter – together - when they saw his leg couldn't take it, when with a teasing look she pulled him to a chair (another surprise, every whore and chance bar encounter since the infarction always over-accommodating, taking it _easy_ on him as they might have with a crippled geriatric) so that he ended up sitting with her straddling him, bouncing. That was when he had first said her name that way, he thought, with that gasp of pleasure in it, and had felt her swell around him, coming for the second time, clutching him as though she might slip from reality. And putting their clothes on later, he had encountered the look he would grow accustomed to, her fleeting surprise – alarm almost - at having enjoyed it.

She had switched them to the closet a week later and it had stayed that way.

Across the park the wind in the firs roared. A storm coming. The traffic light changed to green. He clutched his paper bag with its bottle of South African beauty. His leg ached. Stupid not to have taken the car, stubborn and pompous, but things were picking up. There were possibilities. In two days she was coming to his apartment for dinner.

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Next patient. Bang through the door.

Laura Palmer helped out at the hospital as a candy-striper, he knew. He'd spoken to her before, if only to eye the books she trundled on her library cart, gory-looking crime novels every one, and comment on how well-suited they were to helping patients sleep. She stood now at the window, the dark thundery day making her look tired, though she nodded and smiled when he entered. One of the saner people he'd met in the town and only seventeen. Saner than most of the adults. The patient with her, a frowsy woman swinging her legs from the examining table, was introduced as her mother. A hard face, with hard stupid eyes. Eyes that had seen a lot and taken in nothing. Hair permed too often until it was so wiry you could fence cows in with it. She was smoking, couldn't even stop for a doctor's visit apparently, so he popped a Vicodin just to show he could, then held a urine cup under the stub of cigarette and said, "Out." She stabbed it out furiously. "Problem? Come on, I haven't got all day."

The woman glared, but Laura smiled. "I told you he was like that, Mom."

"There's nothing wrong with me," the mother began, in an irritating nasal tone.

"I'm making her come in," her daughter interrupted. "Mom."

"I'm just tired all the time. I sleep fine, like a log –" He winced. "But I'm sleepy all morning."

"I couldn't wake her up yesterday." Laura's eyes were asking him for something, imploring. She was worried. Curvaceous eyes, in a mellow curved face. School homecoming queen, he thought Amalie might have told him. The only thing you should worry about, he wanted to tell Laura Palmer, is getting out of this place before you get older and turn into your mom. He thought she probably knew that.

"I had to shake her, and put a cold washcloth on her face before she would even open her eyes," Laura was saying. "That's not normal, is it?"

He checked Sarah Palmer's file. Nothing. "What sleeping pills do you take?" he asked her.

"I don't take sleeping pills." He saw Laura frown too.

"Okay, we'll call them what you want, mommy. Pillow candy, a little night music. I want to know the brand and the milligrams." Mother and daughter were both shaking their heads. "Look, sedatives stay in a woman's system longer. You're taking too much at night, too late, and it's still having an effect the next morning."

Sarah Palmer shrugged. "That's just wrong." The W word; he'd never handled that one well.

"Then someone is slipping you a mickey without you knowing." Too loud, but the woman scraped at his sarcasm bone like nails on sheet-iron. "Someone who likes you better asleep than awake. Maybe daddy needs to sneak downstairs now and then for a midnight snack without getting bitched at."

His usual up-yours fare, but he saw Laura Palmer's face change behind her mother.

The teenager looked as though she'd been shot. Gray around the lips, staring into space. A thousand years older.

He spun the stool away, spooked. Not wanting to think. He made a note in the file for a tox screen, told Sarah Palmer a nurse would be by to take blood and urine, and left as fast as his cane would take him. Only one glance back at Laura, those pretty eyes catching his, saying something different now. _Please don't_.

Amalie stood at the main desk. He waited until he saw the Palmers being led off to a lab, then asked her what she knew of Laura.

"Aside from candy-striping, Meals on Wheels, tutoring the Horne boy – a nasty job even for a professional, but they say she calms him –"

"I get it, just an all-round good girl –"

" – she takes cocaine in her spare time and probably sells it. Just living the American Dream. Add to that, oh, some rumoured odd tastes in men…" She was watching his reaction.

"Wow." It did surprise him. "So it's not happy-sitcom land."

Daddy was a corporate lawyer, she told him, the kind that had engendered the original shark comparisons, mom a stay-at-home. If sitcom, it was a rich-family, pampered-child sitcom. No particular reason for Laura Palmer to have turned out well. "Still the best person I know. In the original sense. A truly good person."

He shrugged. "Some people use good deeds to mask the fact that they're kaput on the inside. Numbs the brokenness, I guess." And then there was his kind, he wanted to add, just letting it all hang out like a hernia, the opposite of the Laura Palmers of the world, he supposed, bad deeds to _un_mask the brokenness, but when he looked up Amalie was staring at him as though he'd called her a dirty name, then she turned away and fumbled with the file on the counter. "I've – uh – got to get back," she said. "I've got a patient." The reaction was so strong – and so odd – he wanted to put his hand on her arm, turn her back to him and tell her it would be all right, though he had no idea what 'it' might be, just a sense of that sadness, the past she never talked about. A nurse was approaching from the other direction and he was forced to turn the impulse into a comment instead, before the nurse came into hearing – "See you tonight" – trying to make it a statement rather than a question, and Amalie nodded and left.

He thought of sad pasts all the rest of the day, and of the one item of dress – a leather armband, wide enough to cover her left wrist – which Amalie Parker had never once taken off during their lovemaking, even when every other scrap of clothing fell, how sad it was that they had to hide from one another.

Let your hair down for me tonight, Amalie, he thought.

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Wine on the table. Lasagna in the oven. She was ten minutes late. "Welcome to the Taj Mahal," he greeted her.

She wore a baby-blue blouse with a high collar and a plunging neckline so deep he wanted to plunge right after it. "Surprised you can stand up in here," she said, smiling. It was a tiny place, but separate from the Hayward's house and thus as private as he needed. Spartan. He'd brought almost nothing with him from Princeton. She studied the guitars on the wall. "Will you play for me later?" 

Yes, but not the guitars, he thought. "I had a piano back in Jersey, but I couldn't get it in the trunk."

She was surprised he'd cooked, having expected take-out after his disparaging remarks about his kitchen talents. "I take you at your word," she informed him. "Not sure why."

They talked about nothing over dinner, about other doctors at the hospital, the townspeople. She laughed at the vision he'd had, or rather his description of it, a sort of cosmic revelation about cholesterol that had come to him upon seeing a perfect counter line-up of the town's fattest enjoying the cherry pie down at the diner. He talked about his addiction.

"Sixty milligrams is a lot, but it's not exorbitant." She looked puzzled. "From what I've seen, you seem to take more."

"Ah, someone's been watching." The thought warmed him. She'd taken her shoes off and was running one foot up and down his calf below the table. Maybe it was time for a little honesty. "Actually I – palm a lot of the pills people see me take during the day. Just pass up the mouth, back into the pocket." The pretend swallowing.

She was staring, open-mouthed. "You are kidding." Nope. "But why?"

He wasn't sure, he told her. He needed to see the consternation on patients' faces when he pretended to pop two giant pills while treating them. He tried to explain the way he had been in Princeton, that it had to do with how much he had changed since leaving.

"I was the resident shock jock. Say anything, do anything, as long as it got people thinking. Always provocative. I'm so different here, but there's still that need to provoke. It gets channelled into little things like that."

The wine had emptied quickly and he'd cursed himself for not buying more, but she'd happily accepted his offer of a beer and drank it from the bottle. Talking to her felt good, they had little opportunity for that amid mops and buckets, and seeing her there at last, where he had imagined her many an evening the last two months, was a kick and at the same time as natural as breathing. She fit in, still her classy self against the shabby surroundings, yet unwound, the knot in her loosened, smiling at him over her beer. It felt…right. As nothing in the last five years had.

"You can't be that different here, Greg. Chasing a relative all the way out on the street to argue your point is fairly provocative."

No, she really couldn't imagine it. He scrolled through stories he might tell her. Spitting on a doctor. Faking cancer. "Let's just say my reactions since coming here are milder." A shadow flitted across his mind. "It's as if I've gone to sleep."

"That's not a milder reaction." Her foot had found his crotch, stroking it to erection. "Nothing gone to sleep there."

It left him breathless with joy. "Ah, now it comes down to who will get up and walk over to who."

She walked over to him and straddled him on the chair. It hurt his leg but he wouldn't have let her stop for the world. She unbuttoned his shirt, slowly, then hers, revealing a flimsy bra thing so lacy she might as well have had nothing on at all and which was taken care of in a thrice. So many places on her he wanted to touch and kiss all at the same time, he didn't have enough hands, not enough mouths, _there_ and _there_, then his hands were in her hair. She helped him find the pins to loose the bun, and there it was, cascading around her shoulders and against his face as he nuzzled in to it. She was his, he could do what he wanted with her, and he was damned if they were going to do it on a chair.

"There's a reason we're here and not in a closet," he murmured. She looked at him. "I have a bed and I know how to use it."

Bed being the wrong word for the narrow wood frame and lumpy mattress behind the separating panel that constituted his bedroom, but she didn't seem to mind. They stood beside it for a moment once their clothes were off (all but one item, he thought), and he suddenly wanted to see her stretched out there, to study her body in the full light without having to push aside mops to do so. To celebrate coming out of the closet. "Lie down," he said. It came out rough with desire, and she looked odd, almost frightened at the commanding tone, then did as he said. Yes, stunning, there on the worn floral-print sheets Mrs. Hayward had given him, injecting him with such desire he thought he would burst, yet there was that look she still wore – as he bent to stroke the backs of his fingers up and down her – so taken aback he had to ask, "What?"

She placed a hand on his chest. "Please –" A choked whisper - what could be so hard to get out? "Please…don't ever order me around, Greg."

"_No_." It was a shock. As though he could be that way. Which she had to know. She had set the pace for them from the beginning and he had let her. He wanted more now, that was all.

She nodded.

Then they were lost. The thought of what she had said made him gentle at first, but then the rush took him, there was never any holding it back, she swam in it too. A different brain took over. They might have been wrestlers, pummelling with their bodies to get inside each other. He turned her, explored every orifice. She put her mouth over him as though she needed his cock to breathe and caressed it with her lips and teeth, her hair falling in a red curtain around her face.

He felt it was hours later when they were finished, though he wasn't going to look at a clock. They lay beside each other for a long time, until their hearts slowed, then she broke the spell, simply and casually, by running a finger down his chest and saying, "I need to be getting home."

He felt sick. She was sitting up. "You could sleep here tonight," he told her. The look she gave him was already closed; in a moment she would be putting her hair back up in that stupid bun. "You think someone's going to see you leaving in the morning, is that it?" Anger choked him. "You don't think the Haywards have noticed your car parked out front already?"

"I parked around the corner, Greg." He couldn't look at her. "I'm going to shower."

He lay listening to the shower run, preparing himself for what he was going to do.

When the sound of the water ceased, he limped into the bathroom, noting with satisfaction the leather bracelet lying on the edge of the sink. She stepped out from behind the shower curtain, surprised to see him there, then alarmed as she realized his intentions. They were both shouting at once, but he had her arm – in a grip that would probably leave bruises though he hadn't wanted that – and bent it to expose her left wrist.

"No – _no!_"

The scar was less than ten years old, he guessed. Vertical, not ragged, the smooth line of a doctor's steady hand that had used probably a small-blade scalpel to lay open the radial artery. It would have bled fast. Had she pulled back, frightened by that slide into the dark, and called 911, or had someone found her? She jerked her hand from his. She was crying.

"What is it? What is it, Am? Why did you want to kill yourself?"

"You have no right, dammit – "

"You're beautiful, you're smart." _What could make a woman like you hate life that much?_ "Did the guy mean that much to you?"

"It wasn't that. Leave me _alone_."

She couldn't mean it the way it sounded. She was drying herself off, furious swipes of the towel, then she put the bracelet back on. She turned, half-calm again.

"You think you have some kind of right to me because I strip for you in a closet?"

"No." He could barely get it out.

"Because you don't. What about you, Mr. I-Killed-Someone? Always just joking. You've never revealed one honest thing about your past. Why should I?"

"But I did kill someone."

"Oh right." She grew still, understanding that he meant it.

"I – made a mistake and a patient died. A ten-year old boy…" He found himself leaning against the door for support, his eyes closed, seeing it again. He could feel her breathe.

"Every doctor runs that risk," he heard her murmur.

"Not me. It was something I shouldn't have missed – _wouldn't_ have missed. If I'd just –" He opened his eyes to find her staring. "If I'd just gone to see the patient."

"You had a patient you never looked at?" Ah, she was beginning to understand.

"I'd always made my fellows do the dirty work." Scouts reporting back from the war front. "But my entire department had self-destructed. That was my fault too. I'd driven my fellows away, and I was trying to go it alone. This kid was brought in with stomach pains, vomiting. All I did was look at the file, diagnose a perforated bowel, and then I told the surgeon to go in and fix it." It was like vomiting up poison himself, he thought, talking about it. Five months.

"And that wasn't it?"

"Oh, the colon was perforated all right. Plumber guy patched it up. The only problem was –" he took a breath – "the kid had vascular-type Ehlers-Danlos. Never diagnosed."

Oh she was smart. Her eyes narrowed. "Which meant he shouldn't have been operated on."

"When you've got a rare genetic disorder that makes your internal walls as thin as cheap toilet paper, you don't want your usual ham-fisted surgeon playing squash in there." Amalie was nodding. "Not knowing the kid had a connective-tissue disorder meant he'd put the usual strain and pressure on the organs while operating. The next day the entire anterior of the sigmoid wall opened up. The patient went septic. Clotting, free air, a hematoma on the liver. Pleural effusion. The kid's toilet was flushing straight into his body rather than down the drain. And I still didn't get it." He looked at her. It was hard. She was hugging the towel to herself, shivering. "Because I was depending on nurses – _nurses_ for chrissake – to tell me what the kid looked like. Stupid notes from the admitting. They all said things like 'pale' and 'jaundiced'. Not one used the word 'translucent'. Not once. 'Thin-skinned' might have even done it. When I finally caught on, it was too late." He could feel it again, that moment in the night when he had woken from a dream of being attacked by a crocodile and stumbled to the phone, yelling at the nurse to go check whether the kid had clawed toes, only to be told that the patient had died an hour earlier. "His abdomen dehiscenced while mommy and daddy watched. Mount St. Helens, only with blood instead of lava." She perched on the tub and he found himself beside her on the floor, her hands in his. "I – couldn't anymore. I waited for the autopsy report a day later, which confirmed EDS IV, clawed toes and all, and then I threw some things in the car and drove. Never even went back to the hospital. For all I know they're beating the jungle for me now with a malpractice suit between their teeth." His fingers traced the celtic design on the leather armband at her wrist. He felt emptied. "Your turn," he whispered. She drew her hand away. "I showed you mine, Amalie, now show me yours."

"Please don't make me." She was crying again, just a little tear trickling down one cheek. "I…can't. _Please_."

He sighed. "Okay." Giving in could be a kind of love, he supposed. Maybe Stacy had told him that once. "But you're sleeping here tonight, Am. That's an order."

She nodded, almost managing a smile, and followed him to the bed. Yes, he felt empty, emptied of the stone that had pressed at the bottom of his heart for so many months. As they cuddled close, near the edge of sleep, his mouth in her hair, he thought he heard her murmur, "You're a good doctor, Greg."

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"_Don't breathe a word of this to anyone_."

He awoke in the sun-lanced room, thinking she had spoken, her sleeping form lying soft beside him. The voice had come from outside, through the window they had cracked in the night for air, and he slipped from beneath the covers, checked the time on the alarm-clock, six a.m., and peered out the window. Will Hayward was getting in his car, having thrown the warning sentence at his wife in her wheelchair on the doorstep. The doctor glanced up and saw his tenant staring down through the window. Hayward's face looked so haggard with shock, the despair of someone who has seen the end of the world, that he found himself mouthing, "What?" The doctor understood and motioned for him to meet him at his door.

He threw his clothes on, gently so as not to wake Amalie, and met the doctor halfway, who told him that the murdered body of Laura Palmer had been found that morning, wrapped in plastic and washed up on the shore of the Snoqualmie River.

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Then he sat in his office, watching huddles of mourners converge in the hallway as the day passed, group hugs consisting of whisperers with the latest news (Laura's high-school boyfriend was being questioned – "_No_, not Bobby!") and heads shaken in disbelief. Groups he wouldn't - couldn't - join because he had hardly known her. He thought of pretty eyes. Amalie had been very affected, crying softly in his apartment and then saying she was going home. It was small-town solidarity, he supposed, something he was about as close to understanding as quantum physics. Solidarity – and fear. The worried frowns, none of the nurses able to get anything done. It might as well have been written across their foreheads. _One of us_. Another rumor - the FBI was sending an agent to take over the case, there had been a similar murder far down the coast – brought relief, he saw, minds pulling back from the thought that the evil was in their midst; why, it had nothing to do with them after all. A flurry toward noon, shouts from the ER where an ambulance had arrived: another girl had wandered dazed out of the woods, with the same marks of abuse (no one used the word torture, he noticed, though it reverberated behind their sentences) and had collapsed into a coma before saying anything. Ronette would surely provide the answer when she woke up. They would know soon.

He tried to concentrate on his paperwork. RBCs and BPs. He found he had been staring at the same bloodwork report in his hand for minutes, at the two words Chloral hydrate in the toxicology column. The traditional mickey, soluble in everything from cough syrup to cocoa. A significant find on a tox screen. Not something you took yourself to get a little sleep, but rather what someone slipped you when they wanted you knocked out. When they preferred you asleep rather than awake. The name at the top of the report read Sarah Palmer. Laura had gone gray around the lips.

They were sending an FBI agent.

He folded the tox screen and put it in his jacket pocket, then stared for a long time at the low fleeting clouds beyond the window.

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End of Chapter 1

A/N: Thank you to everyone for reading. Feedback is always appreciated, so please r&r with any thoughts you have.

Though not much has come up yet, the next few chapters will have a lot of spoilers for Twin Peaks, so just in case you always planned to watch the series and never have (and hate being spoilered like I do), you should probably watch it before reading the next installments here. Chap 2 may take longer, but I hope mid-April…


	2. Chp2 The Forest for the Trees

THE FALLS

Chapter 2 (_The Forest for the Trees_)

The disease had progressed.

She curled her toes into the sheets and tried to think of nothing. It didn't help. She should have been saddened the past two days by Laura Palmer's death, even worried if someone was preying on women in the town, and she was, on both counts, grieving and on edge with the rest of them. Yet behind the shock of the news still echoing in her bones other thoughts swirled and wouldn't stop. The germ surging through her blood, the disease that had filled her with joy for the past few months. His face, his hands on her. She was sick with love.

She had needed a diagnostician for a patient. Her first impulse when Hayward recommended House was to consider calling Seattle and looking for one there, but Dr. Hayward assured her he was good and so she had sought out Greg House's office near the back of the hospital, his desk littered with files, which she thought might give her a chance to back out if he was busy. "This is all for show," he told her, and flipped open empty files to demonstrate. As she sat and described her case he gave her the stare she had seen him level on obtuse patients in the clinic, as though what the speaker was saying was in a foreign language he was only slightly curious to decipher, but when she mentioned the dystonia, something clicked.

"You said torticollis."

"That's what I thought the first time his father brought him in. The next time it wasn't just neck jerks. It had moved into his hands and legs. It's task-specific –"

"How do you know that?"

Her nine-year old patient's leg cramps only struck him when he walked down stairs, she told him. "So far."

He had stood and grabbed his cane so rabidly she'd thought for a second he was going to hit her with it. "Show me this kid."

The boy's father had left his son to work the night shift. They got the boy out of his hospital bed in his pyjamas and House made him walk down the stairs, intent on the spasming legs that almost made the kid fall, while the evening nurse across the way gawped. "Now walk down backwards."

"Am I gonna have to use a cane like you?"

"For the rest of your miserable life if you don't do what I say. Turn around and go down backwards."

Which used a different set of muscles, she knew. The sudden spasm that pitched her patient down the stairs might have broken his neck if she hadn't thrown herself in front of House to catch him. The doctor hadn't moved.

"Not task-specific," he said, with a hint of know-it-all glee, and then a quick glance away. Which told her – surprisingly – that he was trying to impress her. _Not the best way to go about it_, she wanted to say.

And yet the case was solved. DYT1 dystonia, he deduced, a potentially fatal disorder that would have the boy in literal knots within months and which was confirmed by genetic testing. They discussed and rejected pallidotomy and he helped her – with a few impressively professional calls to the health-care company – to get coverage for deep-brain stimulation. She didn't see him for a week. When she did, she told him the DBS was not going to happen because the father, a radically rightist nut from the backwoods, refused to have his son outfitted with a brain chip. His stare – at her and then beyond her, contemplating, as though the world's insanity were a crossword puzzle he solved every day – made her start to like him.

"This daddy hasn't met me, has he?"

"Please, Dr. House. Making trouble won't do any good."

He told her to bring the father, alone, to a certain room on the third floor in one hour.

There were people who could surprise you, and others who left you flabbergasted. He lay in the bed, in a hospital gown. He'd rubbed ash under his eyes, she guessed, to give himself that hollowed look. The father stared. "This the guy with the son got the same cussing thing I do?" House asked. The accent mimicked perfectly the flat northwestern tone of the locals. "'Cause I don't like people brought in just to stare, so close your mouth, sir. Only said I'd talk to you 'cause the doc here is so pretty."

The most amazing thing about his act was his arms and hands. DYT1 dystonia contracted the muscles, pulling limbs that should have extended away from one another into tight knots. He held his arms crossed on his chest in a painful-looking tangle, every finger clawed to a different angle. Muscle control that almost went beyond belief. Even his legs below the thin sheet looked bent halfway backward which, with the amount of debridement in his thigh someone had told her about, had to be excruciating. The sweat standing out on his forehead, she realized, was real.

The father was still staring. "My boy gonna look like that?"

"Hell no – he'll be worse. I was a square knot only a month ago. I'm getting better, thanks to this wire in my head. The doctors say I'll be whittling again by next week." He caught her eye, and the slight spasm of his cheek, she saw, was him trying not to laugh. "God, I miss that whittling."

As the father turned to her she had just enough time to put her hand over her mouth, pushing her own laugh into pressure that made tears stand out in her eyes, so that it looked, she supposed, as though she were moved by the severity of it all.

"You gotta get your boy what he needs," House told him.

"I guess I'll – think about it," he said.

And as the father walked out the door, she had turned back. He was already relaxed again, panting slightly, with his hands nerveless at his sides. "You…" she had murmured, then realized she had no idea what to say.

He had shrugged. "When else do I get to lie in bed at work?"

The sheets were growing cold. She stirred, and tugged the pillow up under her head.

Then Greg House had surprised her again – by being so nervous at asking her out that he had practically stammered. Men are in awe of you, he had told her afterward, meaning that he was, and had kissed her, so hesitantly there in the car, not assuming he had the right to, approaching it with such…reverence, that she had felt some room of ice thaw inside her. Not once putting his hands on her. Only letting her know what he wanted by lifting her palm and placing it there, waiting. So different. She had forgotten what it felt like not to have ownership of her body assumed, taken for granted and taken from her in a rush of seeking hands and lips. Respect. Such a cliche word. That hesitancy had made her not talk to him for a week, frightened by her own response, until the day he had come to her defence against snide Benny Wright and she had told him to meet her in the operating room.

Every moment since had fueled her disease. Until today, when she had realized what was happening to him and it had shocked her.

They had attended Laura Palmer's funeral in the morning, arriving in separate cars, greeting each other like casual acquaintances from the hospital, though she saw how it hurt him. She made a point of standing next to him, a small concession, noting glances from some of the nurses present, throughout the farce that they called a funeral. Everyone eyeing everyone, wondering if their neighbor was only faking the grief they really felt, the thought _Murderer_ like a fog seeping between them from the gray cemetery, until Laura's father had fallen on the coffin sobbing and her boyfriend Bobby, apparently released from jail, had screamed that they were all Laura's murderer for having ignored her problems. Which was true. More insight than she would have credited the kid with. They all knew so little of what had gone on in Laura's life. She had known probably more about her than the rest, sharing, as the two of them had, one very dark secret. Greg had bent near to ask who the man standing apart from the crowd was and she had guessed it to be the FBI agent. A boyish face, regulation haircut, who watched the crowd with wide, perceptive eyes, noticed them staring, and came over afterward to introduce himself. Dale Cooper was an oddball, a parody of a G-man straight out of 1940, though she realized part of the act was in order to make people underestimate him. He had heard of Greg's skills and asked a few questions about Ronette Pulaski, though Greg had not been called in on the case of the girl who had not awoken from her coma yet. People started to leave the gravesite, under the weight of a cold drizzle just starting, and as she headed toward her car, Greg had caught up with her and whispered, "Meet me at my place." She hadn't had to ask why. She felt it too.

They had screwed like the world was ending. Holding onto each other in the face of death. "Are we normal?" she groaned somewhere in the middle. "Is there something wrong with us?" but he hadn't answered.

He sat naked at the kitchen table afterward and told her he wanted to show her something. She wrapped herself in a blanket and studied the tox screen he unfolded. She felt as though the top of her head had been taken off.

"Chloral hydrate."

"Laura's mother was pumped full of it. Given to her in the evenings. In cocoa or a bedtime cup of tea. Enough to keep her under all night. She complained she could hardly wake up in the mornings. And no, I do not think it was Laura. Laura's the one who brought her in to see me."

"Greg, did you have this in your pocket at the funeral?" He didn't answer. "If you think Laura's father was involved in her murder, why didn't you show this to Dale Cooper?"

"It doesn't prove anything." He was looking away. "I could be wrong."

Yes, the disease was progressing. Because she had wanted to slap him.

It was the town, sapping his confidence. More than the failed case he was running from, more than his leg or his pills, it was the cold flat wraith of apathy below them in the ground, in the roots of the trees, that deadened them all. It turned them into different people, made them do unthinkable things, she knew well, or fail to do things. He couldn't have fallen prey to that. Not Greg House. Not the provocative, confident man she loved. She had wanted to cry.

Very cold, the sheets. She should have been warmed by the body pressed to her back, pulling out of her now. He was nuzzling her hair, lips against her neck, whispering "So pretty."

She shifted. "Now that tickles, Gr-" And froze. Praying he hadn't noticed. Cursing herself for letting the disease get so far.

Because she had almost called the man beside her Greg.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

He thought about Leland Palmer.

He had seen grief before – numb grief and screaming drop-to-the-floor grief, even a man who had walked calmly out of the Princeton hospital when told his daughter was dead and had shot himself with the gun he kept in his car – and he believed Leland Palmer's grief was real. The pulse in his hands and behind his face as he had watched the man try to hug his daughter's coffin told him so. Eagle eyes in a smart lawyer face, the look turned inward on horror. A man who had gotten by in life by being smooth, likeable probably while he stabbed you in the back, and who found now that death wasn't fooled by unctuous. A broken, devastated man beside his broken stupid wife. Which left him with a tox screen report and theories he couldn't make fit.

Rumors paced the halls of the hospital. Agent Cooper was uncovering good leads and had found out nothing at all. Agent Cooper had made several arrests and had no clues whatsoever. Amalie, visibly distracted, filled him in with the straight stuff now and then. FBI Agent Dale Cooper was apparently a strong proponent of Buddhist spiritualism and was assessing the likelihood of suspects based on how well tin cans with their names on them could be hit by the local sheriff throwing stones. She assured him it was true and – after ensuring no nurses were looking – closed his mouth for him with a fingertip under his chin. He hadn't liked the guy at the funeral and now he had a reason. No, Agent Cooper didn't have a clue.

She was watching him with an odd slant to her head. "Have you spoken to Cooper?"

"No." The tox screen in his jacket pocket burned against his chest.

"When are you going to?" The disappointment in her eyes made him turn away. "Greg?"

Cooper came to the hospital. It had been a week and a half since the funeral. He paused on his way from the lab to study the FBI agent's unnaturally erect posture, reminding him of those Victorian gentlemen who had worn trusses to appear more streamlined, and Cooper motioned him over. The agent stood talking to a group of Ronette Pulaski's doctors. The girl who had been beaten and tortured the same night Laura was murdered had not awoken.

"Dr. House." Cooper smiled broadly. "I'd like to get your opinion on when Miss Pulaski might be expected to wake up from her coma."

The other doctors rolled their eyes, one even turning away in disgust. Standard response. It left the field open for him.

"It's not a coma," he informed Cooper.

General snorts of disbelief. Cooper smiled back and forth between them as though privy to a particularly interesting tennis match.

Dr. Krumberg – he of the walrus moustache, as though all the hair from his bald pate had wandered south - piped up. "She's only what? – a 3 or 4 on the Glasgow scale. If that's not a coma, what is it? And since when do you go examining a patient, Dr. House? Especially one that's not yours."

"It's something not seen before," he told them. "There was never any reason for her to have fallen into a coma in the first place –"

"Oh, head injury from a brutal beating doesn't count?"

"She walked out of the damn woods by herself. She's a headcase all right, but not from the injury. Psychological trauma pushed our Babe-in-the-Woods into some undocumented state between coma and catatonia, a kind of akinetic mutism. Resembles encephalitis lethargica."

"A disease not seen since the 1920's." Cooper's head tilted like a bird's. The other doctors stared at him. "Very interesting, Dr. House. And yet, as Dr. Krumberg here points out, her Glasgow tells us there is no consciousness present. No eye movement, for instance, if I read the report correctly."

He tried to stare Cooper down. So the man knew his stuff. "Her _Glasgow_ is only as good as the doctor who examined and rated her on it. Her face looks like an overused punching bag. The swelling around the eyes makes it easy to miss minimal eye movement." He took an inner breath. "I could wake her up."

Guffaws all around. "L-dopa and naxolone," he added. "Add ice and you've got one bitching cocktail."

"To my knowledge L-dopa is only used in hepatic comas." Cooper again, usurping the doctors' lines. He had to admit admiration at what the agent knew. "I don't believe she's been diagnosed with hepatitis. That would make levadopa a non-indicated therapy and illegal without the informed consent of the parents, doctor. Plus any arousal would only last as long as the effects."

"It's a load of crap anyway," Krumberg broke in. "It could be dangerous. Remember that little promise you made around twenty years ago, House? Something called the Hippocratic oath?"

"I don't think Dr. House has ever understood that oath in the same way others do." Agent Cooper eyed him. "Have you, Dr. House?" So the guy had researched his past better than the hospital that hired him. Good to know. A little scary.

He stared Krumberg down. "Seeing as you don't have any ideas on how to wake her up. Sort of the problem you have with your wife during sex, isn't it?"

The walrus moustache twitched. Krumberg walked away. After a moment the younger doctors followed.

Dale Cooper sighed. "Dr. House, I believe you are right about this being primarily psychological." The agent's face took on a holy sheen. "Ronette Pulaski is on the Path of No." The Path of _No_? "Her spirit is wandering, unable to face what happened to her. It has to be brought back gently."

He felt that tight knot in his stomach, the one that said he was going to explode. "Tell me, Agent Cooper, what does FBI stand for nowadays? Federal Bureau of Idiocies? Foolish Buddhist Ideas? While you're throwing rocks at cans and meditating, someone with a grudge against women and what looks like the peen end of a hammer is probably stalking his next victim."

"My Buddhist ideas have been of assistance to me in the past, Dr. House. I've solved several cases after experiencing dreams in which I was given clues by a _sadag_. Foolish, perhaps, but there's no better source of wisdom than a fool sometimes." He frowned away in thought. "Though in this case I've had no such inspiration. Some spirit in the town seems to be acting as a block." He turned back. "Yes, I often encounter opposition to my beliefs –"

"Because they're _not evidence-based_." It came out loud. He saw Amalie turn from a conversation at the end of the hall to watch him.

"Neither is your suggested use of L-dopa."

"Well, why don't we just have the Dalai Lama come and burn a candle in Ronette's ear?" _Very loud_.

"I'm not personally acquainted with the Dalai Lama, plus I doubt he would travel that far –"

"You're not getting anywhere on this case, are you?"

Cooper smiled. "I have to go, Dr. House." He turned to leave.

Amalie had approached. The brush of her sleeve against his made him call out to Cooper: "Have you looked into the family at all?"

The agent glanced back. "We're working all the angles."

"What angles?" he muttered once they stood alone. "The ones on Tarot cards? The Tibetan Connection?"

"He's finding out a lot," Amalie said. "I mean, with normal cop methods. I think he's good at what he does." She looked almost worried.

"Ah, you're the murderer."

"Not funny, Greg. Besides, you're my alibi."

"And you're mine."

She watched Cooper as he went out the door. "He knows more about this town after a week than some of the Neanderthals who have lived here since the dawn of time. Scary in a way. I mean about the townspeople. That people can be so ignorant about others around them." She suddenly wasn't meeting his eyes. "Why didn't you show him the tox screen?"

"I'm not sure it means anything anymore." She looked tense. Beautiful, her face locked in winter cold, topped by its red-gold sun of hair, with a crinkle of frown around her eyes. "Hey, needing some down time in the closet, Dr. Parker?"

"I'm busy." A nurse approached and she strode away.

Some spirit in the town acting as a block. He touched the tox screen in his pocket again. Felt the ghost hands holding him back. There had been disappointment in her eyes. Disdain at the man who was stopped in the middle of his life, going nowhere.

He thought of Laura Palmer's eyes saying _Please don't_.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Great Northern Hotel was an airy coffin of high redwood beams and polished lights. Outside the bay windows of the bar, mist rising from the falls fogged the night. He studied his scotch and watched the bar's inhabitants imbibe. A sampling of the town's upper echelon. The mayor, the Haywards who gave him a nodding wave. Past the lobby doors he saw a flock of foreigners surge by, small and blond, tittering something Scandinavian, and then Leland Palmer. The woman he had chatted up earlier behind the front desk came into the bar. "Dale Cooper's just gone up to his room now, Dr. House," she told him. He thanked her, ignoring her interested smile, and touched the paper in his pocket.

He found the upstairs hall. A subtle smell pinched his nostrils. The door to Cooper's room stood wide open. Dale Cooper lay on the floor of his hotel room in an S-curve of blood that seeped from a fresh wound in his side. The smell was cordite, he realized.

Ten thoughts whipped his head, what to do, hide because the shooter was possibly near, hadn't he heard that somewhere, just leave, call for help. No doctorly thoughts. A light in the room was alive, a membrane of pressure that was not cordite attenuating his senses. Do what you came to do and show him the tox screen. Would he listen now? Cooper lay on his back. The agent's eyes were open, pupils dilated, huge with knowledge, then they snapped back from whatever dark room he contemplated. They looked at each other. Cooper opened his mouth, shifted and more blood lavaed from his side. "I've been shot," he mumbled.

"I know."

The spell broke. The light in the room was normal. He kneeled. A shirt near the chair became a bandage and he applied pressure. No exit wound. Cooper's skin was cold. He was shouting for help, a maid screamed, then the room was filled with people who – mercifully - followed his instructions, a sudden onslaught of noise and faces. "A giant," Cooper whispered. "Call me Dr. House," he said, and told him not to speak.

The sound of sirens spilled EMTs into the room. Then he was left alone, perched on the bed, while Sheriff Truman and an ancient busboy with a hot toddy on a tray gazed at him oddly from the door. He had blood on his hands. "Ketchup," he informed them and sought the bathroom.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Stumped." Hayward glanced back at the knot of cops and doctors around Cooper's hospital bed.

"Seems to be the motto of this town."

Will Hayward's haggard look from the morning of Laura's murder had set in at some point, a dusting of age across his forehead. "No one has any idea who might have shot Cooper before you found him last night. He only remembers opening the door, seeing a ski mask. He must have been getting close to who killed Laura. Did you hear him just now? He was telling the sheriff about a vision he almost had lying there on the floor of his room. A spirit was going to reveal everything to him. You apparently interrupted the process, Dr. House, when you came in and started working on him."

He clicked his tongue. "_Damn_. If I'd just let him die, we'd know who killed Laura."

The group around Cooper dissolved and exited the room. "He's sleeping peacefully," a doctor informed them as they left.

"Sweet dreams," House tossed out. Hayward gave him a dark glance and left with them.

He turned to find Amalie behind him. "My scepticism is disrupting Agent Cooper's _ch'i_ or _ka_ or whatever," he told her. "Pick your mantra. Think giving him Viagra would get his inner flow going again?"

"You saved his life, Greg. Right place, right time."

"From the looks Sheriff Truman gave me, you'd think I wasn't there by coincidence." They gazed back at the sleeping Cooper. "It was Leland Palmer." He meant the murderer of Laura and she shifted beside him. "I believe that now, Am."

"You said yourself there's no real evidence."

He shrugged. "It's always the father." He felt her sharp look on him. "Cooper hasn't even questioned the guy about the night of her death, has he? Looked into the family relationship at all? Busy chasing his visions. Why show him anything that looks like evidence? He'd believe a dream more than he would facts." A sliver of thought curled out of his backbrain, the familiar warmth spreading through his bones that heralded a gloriously stupid idea. He loved that feeling. Hadn't had it in a while. "He _would_ believe a dream, wouldn't he? Am -" He turned to her. That look, he didn't know how he'd gone without it so long back home. Her green eyes stared up at him in trust, and to hell with the nurse coming down the hall, she kept her eyes on his. A lover's look. A belief that the insane things he did were right. He wanted to keep that look, wanted to pull her body to him right there, and he turned it into a hand on her arm. "Come with me to my office."

The bottom drawer of his desk was filled with unlabelled bottles and vials, but he knew the one he wanted. "Years ago," he told her as he searched, "a group studying sleep and dreaming did a brilliantly simple experiment. They went to sleep labs and whispered words in people's ears - calf, sailboat, boot - then woke them and asked what they'd been dreaming. Every one of them had incorporated the word into their dreams through the subconscious. Ah –" He lifted an ampoule with a brownish liquid. "Dreams are always half inside, half what's going on outside." She was shaking her head. "We're going to supersize Dale Cooper's supernatural dreams for him."

"By – what? Whispering in his ear that Leland Palmer killed his daughter?"

"Why not?" He glanced at her. Whatever look he had latched onto moments before was gone. She looked incredulous. "What better chance, Am? He's sleeping, still half-drugged from the surgery. We have motive, access – and means." He juggled the ampoule, fighting down his sick feeling. "This little dandy is called a CREB enhancer – it's a binding protein for cyclic AMP in the brain. Basically tweaks short-term memories over into being stored as long-term. Ought to help Cooper remember his 'dream' when he wakes up."

"Something like that has to be highly experimental, Greg. Where in the hell did you get it?"

"Friends in low places. Well, okay, enemies in high places. The kind of pharmaceutical creeps not averse to an off-the-record test of their new drug. I collect things like this when they come my way. This little beauty is just the latest in nootropic smart drugs. It's the future, Am. We'll all learn in our sleep and everyone will be as brilliant as I am."

"Has this ever even been put in a human?"

He blinked at her. "It's been put in a rat."

"Greg – "

"Not that far removed from an FBI agent." Then more seriously: "Coming with me or are you going to stand there being indignant all night?" _Please come with me_.

They waited until night had emptied the hospital of visitors. She kept watch at the door of Cooper's room while he pushed the enhancer. Within seconds the monitor registered a spike in Cooper's heart rate, not enough, he hoped, to call the sleepy night nurse from her own monitor at the end of the hall, just delta waves clicking around into theta, the agent's brain turning over to wallow in the great mudslick of memory retrieval. The half-awake state identical to hypnosis and which he had been hoping for. Dale Cooper's face in sleep looked boyish again, as it had the first time he had seen him at the funeral. A man who seemed to have never known trouble, or never let it break him. At one with the world. They were opposites, he thought, light and dark.

He knelt and whispered, "The daddy did it," felt Cooper stir, then some sense took him, a knowledge that he had to _be_ Laura and he whispered, in a higher voice: "My daddy did it to me, Agent Cooper" - _did what?_ " - these sick things to me." _Until I was dead_. Terrifying because daddies were supposed to love you, weren't they, but they had hammers for hearts, or belts, flying up and down, cigarettes to burn you with. A hand, holding an object, lifting and falling. A mist of blood before your eyes, through the gray of pain. Things that made you want to be dead and so you died inside. Until you were dead, inside. And they still called your name…

_Greg_. It came from outside. "Greg…!"

He had his forehead on the edge of a hospital bed. Amalie was shaking his shoulder. "You've been in here ten minutes," she whispered. "What are you doing - reading Moby Dick to him?"

Horror flooded him. "I haven't been here ten minutes."

She looked ready to cry. "You were mumbling into the bed." He realized he knelt near the middle of the bed, Cooper's head feet away. He felt too weak to stand, acid threading his blood. The agent slept on, snoring softly. She had her hand over her mouth, and he stumbled out with her, grabbing his cane at the last moment.

They pretended not to hurry down deserted halls. In his office she spun. "What is _wrong_ with you, Greg?" Behind her the late sky, obscured by clouds, pressed against the long windows. The place was a tomb at night. _I saw a sacrifice_, he wanted to say. A child… "Did the Indians throw children's bodies over the falls?" he asked her. "Was that their burial?" He wanted to tell her something, about the blood hammering behind his eyes, because she was the only one who could ever know. Her hair was undone on one side, a strand near her frowning mouth. He wanted to brush it away. "Did they wrap them in hides?" _Instead of plastic_. She only stared at him.

"I had to shake you, Greg. You looked like you were in a trance."

"Not me - don't do mysticism." She approached and touched his forehead where he was sweating. "Revelations, yes. Putting two and two together. More than Cooper does."

"Did you even do what you went to do? Your little whispering act?"

"I…don't know." He swallowed his sudden panic. "I can't remember."

"I'm going home. Before you come up with some other kooky stunt. Greg. I'm going home, and you can keep your evidence in your pocket and your CREB enhancer…" The sweat on him had turned cold. She looked so impenetrable. He wanted her to stay and warm him, unbutton her blouse for him or just hold him, and as she turned away he took her arm. They stood that way, like children facing off on a playground. He had felt a cry, some dream of children hurt, and he had to tell her but it was already fading. She looked down at his hand on her arm. No, he couldn't order her around.

"Let go of me, Greg."

He let go of her.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"He called the sheriff as soon as he woke up, doll." Sheila was a local, with a hard smile and keen eyes, the best nurse in the place though close to retiring, and she liked him. He had never known a woman who called him doll. She motioned him near. "Says he had a dream and now he knows who killed poor Laura."

Beyond Sheriff Truman's black cowboy hat he could see Dale Cooper moving back and forth in his room, getting dressed. No truss, but his torso was wrapped tightly in white swathes against the bullet wound. He was talking to the sheriff with animated gestures.

Amalie waited for Sheila to turn away. "Sounds like you did it," she muttered to him.

"So much for the supernatural. Comes down to an unshaven jerk whispering in your ear."

Cooper eased into the hall and saw them. "You shouldn't be leaving," Amalie told him.

"Oh, but he puts the 'Cooper' in 'recuperate', doesn't he?"

"Ah, Dr. House. I wanted to see you. You may not need to wake Ronette after all." Cooper took his coat and pistol holster from the sheriff who had followed him out.

"That a fact?"

"I've had a dream in which Laura Palmer whispered the name of her murderer in my ear."

_Pray tell_. "You remember your dreams that well then, Agent?"

"I do this one. Only because I woke up directly afterwards. It was some time early in the morning. A long time after you and Dr. Parker here came into my room and left again."

He felt his hand pressed into the head of his cane, his tongue probing his teeth, wanting to speak. Dale Cooper's eyes, he saw, were not boyish; they were changeable, shading from light to dark.

"And what did dream Laura tell you?"

A smile, light again. "Well, that's the problem. I don't remember." He handed Sheila the release form. "Until it occurs to me, I'll just have to continue my investigation of events in the town." Behind him, Sheriff Truman was staring at them.

His words felt like rocks in his mouth. "Then you don't…really remember the dream at all."

"I remember – a midget." It was spoken softly. Cooper gazed away. "A midget who – in some way I didn't understand – was…actually a tall man. A giant almost. Or vice versa. He held the key to everything." He shrugged, puzzled. "I do have to be going. Dr. House – Dr. Parker – " He gave them a slight nod and left with Truman.

"_Presque vu_," he muttered. "The almost-seen. The feeling you're about to grasp the meaning of it all just before it slips away. God sends you an e-mail and someone pushes the delete button just as you're about to read it."

"And perfectly common." Amalie watched him. "From brain disorders to anyone who just had the right word on the tip of their tongue."

"The pharmaceutical company will be interested to hear their CREB enhancer has that effect. Even if it didn't enhance any CREBs."

"Or maybe you picked up the placebo by mistake, Greg. Maybe this is what happens when you try a stupid trick instead of just telling him what you know."

"Think so? But it was so much more fun."

She turned and walked away.

A midget who was a tall man. Or vice-versa. He sighed and tapped his cane on the floor. Sheila was watching him. Damn the town, with its diners full of the oblivious, and damn Cooper. "Sheila, do you think you could get hold of that file on Ronette Pulaski for me again and make some copies?"

"Sure, doll."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

And the sea of trees in the night knocking _tap tap_ against his back window coalesced into a command; he couldn't sit in his apartment and pluck his guitar, the music too disjointed, a few strings missing, or all of them. He found his car keys, the engine roar like a gun in the preternatural dark, and took the first turn that led down to the center of town. Her apartment building was a sleeping animal; as he watched a light went on and then off on the fourth floor, an eye opening up only to close again, but she lived on the second floor, he knew, third from the left. That black square. It was three a.m., he realized, noting the green dial on his dash with a slight shock. He was an idiot. It was his heart that wouldn't go to sleep without her tonight, without this glimpse of just a pane of glass that belonged to her. Take a pill, dammit. Through the trees far off at the end of the thoroughfare lights flashed, tiny dancing beams. Kids with flashlights perhaps. He had seen that kind of light before in the town, always at the edge of the dark woods, from his upstairs window or on his walks, a hint of blue, never seeming to bounce naturally. This light grew and he realized it was the headlamps of a car. So he was not alone at three in his closet of a world of a town. Murderous sleeping town. As the car drew near, he saw it was a silver Prius exactly like Amalie's. It pulled into a space directly in front of Amalie's building. Amalie got out.

She was alone, moving tiredly. Fumbling in her coat pocket for her doorkey. She had her hair down.

He watched her disappear through the door, a glance back (he had parked instinctively in the dark between two streetlamps, he realized). Too far to make out her face, only the red gleam of tangled hair at her shoulders, then she was gone.

He could see his hands on the cold steering wheel. Useless hands. His breath was beginning to fog the glass. Go ring her bell, yell, smash things. He would do nothing, he knew. There was no answer to his throat turning to stone like this. Because the answer had been given. The question that had driven him crazy for months, why she was hot then cold with him.

She was parking around the corner for someone else.

Then the pain shot through him. He _was_ crazy; the ennui of the town - that had bled out into the murder of Laura Palmer – curled inside him. He had blacked out with his head on Cooper's bed. He wandered the streets at night to check up on his faithless lover. He was poisoned.

And there was an answer to his pain.

He had his own tox screen in his head and it told him it was time to detox, just get her out of his system – get all of it out - by the best method there was: abstinence. Removal, distance. Cold turkey. Yes, there was a solution to it all. It had worked in Princeton and it would work here. _Just leave_.

He would run away.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

End of Chapter 2


	3. Chp3 Black and White

Chapter 3 – (_Black and White_)

…and the disease meant that she always got to work early - no matter how tired she was – because she would see him there. The moment each day when she first heard his deep voice in argument around a corner or caught a glimpse of his silhouette – all crooked angles and yet straight, seeming to lean heavily on his cane one second only to twirl it the next – was like the first shot of coffee warming her blood, or better yet, like her alarm clock, waking her from a torpid sleep. The first real thing every morning, so that when he hadn't arrived by ten, it felt like atrial flutter, her heart shaking with cold, needing its hit, and hearing his name was even worse.

"Dr _House_?" Nurse Sheila looked confused. "But he asked me for this file only yesterday."

Hayward shrugged. They stood at the far end of the counter and she could barely hear them. "…not even a two-week notice. Just caught me in front of the garage this morning and asked me to let the hospital know. Said it was time to move on."

No, she wasn't awake, because it had to be a dream, and in dreams you acted as you did in real life; if you harbored secrets in your daily life you did it automatically in nightmares, simply reaching for a file and saying: "I'll take the copies over to him, Sheila. He may still want them." If you were good at never letting anyone into your thoughts, then they would hand you the file without that questioning look. They wouldn't even exchange that knowing glance between them, because you knew how to conceal every emotion, no matter how devastating, with a disinterested smile and it was natural that you would want to visit a colleague at his apartment one last time – quickly, before he left - to say goodbye.

Goodbye.

It hit her in the car, that word, the _no_ hammering at her, dread at the pit of her stomach spewing into her heart, then she was on Duprey, and pulling into the Haywards' drive, climbing his stairs. Knocking on the door with a hand that wasn't hers.

The door flew open so abruptly it frightened her. His blue eyes met hers a second too long. She had known they could do that. That stare of utter disinterest had been levelled on her from the start, taking time – months - to evolve into the soft-shelled longing she had come to live for. The crinkles of a laugh. Now his eyes might have been chips of ice. He left the door wide, without a word, ignoring the file she held toward him, and turned back to what he was doing, which was tossing objects into a cardboard box.

"What are you doing?" _Stupid_. She hadn't thought she would be able speak, almost couldn't.

"Leaving."

So matter-of-fact. Goodbye. Surely his own failures - with the boy in Princeton, with Cooper – even the odd thing that had happened to him at Cooper's bedside - wouldn't push him to run away twice. It was something else. The tension emanating from him was unbearable. He had left his cane dangling from the lampshade and cringed back and forth across the room as he packed, beating at his leg now and then in a way she realized he probably did thoughtlessly when he was alone. As though she wasn't there. She felt the pressure behind her eyes – _This is the last time you will see that face _– the pressure of her heart in her throat. _That straight crooked body_. It was impossible. There had to be something to give him pause, anything, no matter how idiotic. "But…you've got evidence in a murder, Greg. Evidence you haven't even shown to Cooper."

He stopped packing to toss a paper onto the desk beside her. The tox screen. "You do it." He caught her gaze. "This town's problems aren't mine. I've got my own problems, which I've been neglecting lately, and I plan to spend some quality time with them." His eyes narrowed. He was waiting for her reply.

She fingered the tox screen. "But…you're the one who could convince him." _Because you're you_. "Because that's the way you are."

"I might once have been. I'm not anymore." She was shaking her head. "Oh come on. What do you expect me to do, Am? Ride out and save the day? Lasso Leland Palmer and drag him into the town square?" He was tossing things into the box again. "Hero material I am not."

"I don't know what that means."

He spun. "Oh, look at me. I'm a cripple, dammit." It shocked her. He had never spoken of himself like that. "I'm already on the run from the last mess I made. I pumped an FBI agent full of an unlicensed drug and he probably knows." His eyes filled with shadows. "My girlfriend makes me do her in a broom closet because she's ashamed to let it be known she's seeing me, and I go along with it. How's that for a hero?"

With a jolt she realized that whatever crisis of confidence he was going through she had added to it. For a second it left her giddy with joy, the thought that she could have that much effect on him.

"That's – that's not true, Greg. I'm not ashamed of you." It was only the fear, she wished she could tell him. The terror that, once others knew they were involved, then rumors – the truth about her – would get back to him. His gaze would not be disinterested then, it would be scornful, hating. She would curl up and die under it.

"Right. If you're not ashamed of me, what is it then?" He was still watching her, tensed. "You've been screwing me like lanky middle-aged men were going out of style, but when I say let's take this on stage you're suddenly Miss Prim about it. What – me? Screwing him? – no way."

"It – it wasn't about the sex."

Pain ran across his face and hid again. _I didn't mean it like that_. "Thanks. Also nice to know. Aside from all the other crap going on, it's just obvious you don't want me in your life. Not much keeping me here, is there?"

Issues all so complicated she couldn't think. From his side it would have looked as though she were toying with him. He wanted more, things she couldn't give. She'd held herself from him for reasons only she could know, and it was part of what was driving him away. From the way he stood, waiting as though for his own execution…it meant everything. "No, that's – that's not it," she stammered. It's just that…if I were to let you into my life, Greg, so many things would have to change."

"Sort of the definition of not wanting someone in your life, isn't it?" He barked a laugh and tossed an ashtray which must have belonged to the Haywards in the box then retrieved it. So angry, she realized, he didn't know what he was doing. "I can't order you to publicly declare we're together, Amalie. Can't _order_ you to do anything, according to your very prim instructions. Maybe I'm too used to telling people what to do and maybe that's bad, but take that away from me like you have, and I feel like I'm just being led around by the cock."

He spit the last word out like dirt. A hole was opening up inside her, the knowledge that his entire anger was directed at her, that he would walk out the door in a moment because of her, sand slipping through her fingers, lanky middle-aged sand with a cane and an attitude, but the only thing in her life keeping her sane, and there was nothing she held that would stop him. Unless it was the one thing – honesty. And that was entirely impossible. _Do something_. "You can tell me what to do, Greg," she whispered.

"Oh, I can?" His voice had grown loud. She felt her blood beneath her skin tremble. "That a fact?" He turned to face her. "Take your clothes off."

"What? Greg, please –"

"_Take your clothes off_."

She felt as though he had told her to shoot someone. He couldn't be that way. He stood waiting.

"Go on!"

A test and yet her fingers against her throat as she plucked at the top button of her blouse were cold; other, ghost hands plucking in her mind, always rushing at her clothes, always that moment when she would think _You could walk out now_ and never did. His eyes held that same greed now, not for her body, she knew, but for her obedience. For one vicious moment of power over her _not you, you can't need that_, then her hands were moving, fumbling swiftly though they trembled, working down her blouse and letting it fall behind her, not an ounce of erotic in it, then her bra, couldn't be happening, not with him but it was. His eyes, she saw, had changed, intent not on the fact that he had ordered her to do something, but the fact that she was doing it, his mouth opening and then closing; the slow start of amazement, as though witness to a chemical reaction he had never expected. She stood bare-chested, but there went the tears, she couldn't let that happen, and she daubed at her face before moving her fingers to the button of her slacks, all so hard because she was trembling, trying to hurry–

"Take your hair down." Barked out again, more testing, but with an stunned curiosity now, would she really do it, and she forgot the pants, brushed shaking fingers through her hair, loosing the pins which fell on the floor in a clumsy clatter that made her gasp out a sob, the tears spilling over now, just obey, stumbling ham-handed obedience, do what he ordered if it would only make him stay. The look on his face was beyond amazement: it was utter, incredulous shock and why not, it wasn't every day he saw a train wreck, got to see a woman he might have respected just fall apart in front of him, transformed into this automaton that cried while it stripped for him, about as erotic as a doctor's appointment, but then it was the disease driving her, you see doctor I'm sick. She tried to smooth her hair on her shoulders, but the tears were dripping from her chin, and she moved back to the button of her slacks, yes just a wreck inside, a slut who would do whatever a man told her to. Time to see her for what she was. This is me, Greg, she wanted to say, and knew she'd already said it.

Then he had moved to her, his hands were on hers, preventing her from going on, so tight on her wrists it hurt. His look said _I get it_, still shocked but determined not to let her make any more of a fool of herself. And then the tears were there for real, a flood she couldn't hold back, her own miniature Snoqualmie Falls right there in his apartment, and he held her while she leaned into his chest, sobbing, begging him to please _please_ not leave her there, alone with herself.

His arms were all the way around her. She could hear his voice in her hair, or rather sensed its low tones, deep and mellow, a whiskey voice, they used to say, murmuring: "No. I won't."

………………………………………………………………….

When they finally peeled away from each other he still looked shell-shocked.

"Put your clothes back on, Lady Godiva," he told her.

He sat at the table and she sat across from him, her blouse a wad in her lap, trying to dry her tears. His face said he was still battling to comprehend what had just happened. They sat for so long, just gazing at each other, that she felt the sun crawl up the window; she was being reassessed.

He flicked at the file in front of him. "I guess I need to call Hayward and tell him I'm not quitting." She could barely nod. "The nurses are going to know you had your hair down."

"I don't care."

A split-second of joy crossed his face. "Really?"

"Really."

He looked away, flipped open the file. "This the excuse you gave them for coming over here?" She nodded. He snorted, a strained chuckle. "I had this plan to wake up Ronette." He extracted a sheet from the file. "You know what this is?" He was avoiding her gaze, she realized, looking for a distraction. Easier to get lost in doctor talk than to try and pick apart their little drama. He pointed to a line of the read-out. "Diurnal variation in Ronette's cortisol. What does that tell you?"

"Sleep-wake cycles." His approving gaze warmed her.

"Which rules out a coma. That moron Krumberg hasn't even looked at this. Or if he did, his moustache got in the way."

"You could still wake her up, Greg."

"And she would tell us who their attacker was, Leland Palmer or otherwise. But then that would make me the hero, wouldn't it?" He grew quiet. "Tell me –" He was studying the rest of the room, anything to avoid meeting her eyes. "Tell me what – just happened over there, Am."

"I don't know." _I'm sorry_. They were beyond apologies. "I – I'm not strong, Greg." He finally looked at her. "You're the only strong thing I know." He looked lost. She might as well have told him he was polite, or had a good bedside manner. She picked up the paper with Ronette Pulaski's readings and shoved it at him, ignoring the absurdity of sitting there topless talking about Laura's murder. "Do this. You have to."

He hesitated for a long time before taking the paper from her. "I know."

………………………………………………………………………..

He couldn't get her voice out of his head.

Not the things she had said trying to persuade him to stay. (He had known she would come to his apartment, why else had he told Hayward and put off packing for hours? - The subconscious wins again). Not her words, growing ever more desperate, until they had reached the farce stage, her arguments he could counter like some superman batting away bullets with his bare hands because it all came down to her not wanting him, or not wanting the same way he did, the wish he had sometimes to stand in the middle of the hospital lobby and yell it, stretch like a bird in ecstatic display, crow _mine_, so that the anger made him try a stupid test instead of confronting her with the truth of having seen her at three a.m. No, it was the moment, once the shock of her crying had shrivelled to a frightened knot inside him, the moment he had stepped to her, stopped her hands from doing their little self-destruct strip act, and she had whispered, as though he were commanding her to go on: "I am, I am!" Not really seeing him, seeing someone else perhaps, pleading, as though she expected to be punished for not obeying quickly enough. Expecting punishment as her due.

I am, I am.

All the classy veneer he thought he knew fallen away, just herself, as screwed up apparently in her own way as he was, though he still didn't know why.

Her hands struggling against his, then yielding. Her tear-streaked face so beautiful, so…_real_ he had thought he wouldn't be able to hold her, simply too weak with love even while he put his arms around her.

I am, I am.

Ronette Pulaski's room was dim; it was six in the evening but her parents still sat in the corner like coma patients themselves. Tree stumps. A male doctor he didn't know – very young, with pimples and a look that yelled uncertainty – was checking the bed chart.

_Just do it_. He crossed quickly to the bed and took the vial from his pocket.

"What are you doing?" The doctor's voice even sounded pimply. "You can't do that."

"Sorry, I don't take _can't_ from anyone who hasn't started shaving yet."

"What's going on?" The father had stood and approached the bed. His wife behind him trembled. They were simple people, he saw, the kind society termed good. They probably deserved an explanation, even if it was one they couldn't understand.

"You've been lied to," he told them as he pushed the L-dopa. The doctor rotated in place, apparently torn between going to rat on him and staying to watch the crime. "A doctor lie, the kind used in lieu of Hey we don't know what's wrong with her. Believe me, I've been there myself. Only this – " He lifted the comatose girl's arm and laid it half across her chest. It sank only slowly back to her side. "This is called motor response. If the little tyke here –" he indicated the doctor – "were actually finished with med school, he could tell you that. A coma has a lot more flop to it. Think rubber hose. Which means it's not a coma and she can be woken up."

"You're House, aren't you?" The doctor turned to the parents. "This is the one Krumberg warned us about. This treatment is dangerous –"

Ronette jerked.

"Beautiful," he murmured. He hadn't expected it to work that quickly.

The swelling around the victim's beaten face had had time to recede. Ronette Pulaski was a plain thin girl, with dark lank hair that lay in oily strings on the pillow. About twenty, he remembered from the chart. Older than Laura Palmer. No acquaintance between them, according to the town.

When her eyes opened he felt a tremor. Dark pupils hugely dilated, black pits full of horror. She was not awake.

It was going to be bad.

"Laura," she croaked. The dry rasp from her throat hurt to listen to. "We can't – can't leave Jack's. I don't want to!"

"Ronette, honey –" Her mother was at her side. Ronette didn't see her. Trapped in her relived nightmare.

"I don't care if they pay more!" The sentence echoed through the quiet room, its implications loud. They were all holding their breath, he realized. "It's safe here at Jack's – Laura !" The last was a scream. She sat bolt upright. Her arms beat at him, then clutched, and he tried to hold her while the younger doctor pressed her in vain back toward the bed. Her hands in his sleeve were hard as stone. Her skin was cold, though sweat stood out on her forehead. Adrenaline shock. Where the sheet had slipped away he could see her legs cramping up, curling in on themselves, the skin of the calves knotting, which would have been excruciating if she had been aware of it. "No! _Nooo!_" Her screams collapsed into a sob. "Laura." She was looking straight into his eyes, huge pupils seeing – not him, he knew – but a pretty seventeen-year old. Seeing horror. Ronette smelled of the woods, he realized with a slight shock, vegetation and smoky pine needles, a film that should have washed off her after two weeks in a hospital. Her fingernails had found his arms. She had her lips at his ear. "He – he burns," she whispered, then drew back to look him straight in the eye again. So rational. "He burned you."

Then she jerked again, a spasm so strong it threw her across the bed and tore the drip from the back of her hand, a cry like a shot animal, seeming to come not from her mouth but from her very body, which jerked now uncontrollably. "Seizing – help me get her on her side!" The young doctor flipped her, found a compressor for her tongue, a quicker response than he would have credited the guy with, while he struggled to stanch the blood, freed from its drip tube, that fountained from her hand, working automatically because he didn't want to think, _couldn't_ think: the machines, the white sheets, all the accoutrements of his professional life of twenty years suddenly strange beasts because of what she had said, their outlines moireing around him, near then far. He was dizzy, a blackness in his throat that would choke him.

He burned you.

Cigarettes to burn you with.

She had been talking to Laura, dammit, not to him.

The seizure stopped. Ronette went limp.

"_Is she dead!_" It was the mother, her daughter's panic devolving onto her. "Oh god, is she?"

"No," the other doctor told her, with a sharp glance at the monitor. "But she's worse off than she was before. Respiration failing. She's going to have to be intubated. Here, help me, for chrissake!"

He let the doctor go to work with the tube. "What's Jack's?" he asked him.

"Are you going to help me or not? Bag!"

He handed him the bag. "What's Jack's?" Across the bed the parents were hugging each other. The daddy knew what Jack's was, he saw.

The doctor wouldn't look at them. "One-Eyed Jack's. It's a – casino up on the border," he replied.

The place he had heard about. "You mean the one with the bordello in the back?" The mother stared at him. "Was she working as a croupier there?"

The doctor had finished intubating, but he continued to fiddle with the bag, embarrassed. "The Jack's croupiers are all men," he finally said.

"Wow, you know a lot about it."

"What are you saying?" the father yelled. "That she worked in the back or something? She had a good job at the department store!"

"You heard it from Sleeping Beauty's own lips." Ronette's mother groaned and the father turned on him. "She was apparently in it for the money. Or rather – _it_ was in her. Often, I presume. You should have given her more pocket money, daddy."

"_You shut up_!" Pulaski was rounding the bed. He gripped his cane, readying himself to block a punch. The guy halted in front of him. "My girl ain't no hooker!" Mother Pulaski was crying. "Whatever you give her made her crazy – she wouldn't a said those things in her right mind. And now she's worse." The daddy's breath smelled of onions and bad teeth. "You call yourself a doctor? You can kiss your license goodbye, fucker – I'm gonna have a lawyer on your ass so fast you'll be working alongside me in the sawmill in a week!" He took his sobbing wife's arm and dragged her from the room, calling for Krumberg.

The younger doctor had stabilized Ronette. "You're insane," he said, straightening.

"But at least now we know more. Our little doe here went out in the woods and bit off more than she could chew. Bet she'll never do that for a buck again." He winked on the word _buck_.

"You're not only insane – you're an insane bastard."

"I've always felt you shouldn't have one without the other."

The doctor left.

He gazed down at Ronette's slack features. So Laura Palmer had finished up her candy-striping for the day or her Meals on Wheels round, told her mom she was going out for the night, and driven, once – possibly several times – a week, up to the border to play dipstick with sweaty loggers, maybe the fathers of girls she went to school with, or to suck off rich Canadians down for a good time. It was hard to imagine. He thought of pretty eyes and a soft smile, the demons that a good deed could hide. The darkness clouding his own thoughts.

………………………………………………………………………..

He found Amalie leaving her office. "I woke Ronette up."

She smiled and kissed him, a peck on the lips. "I'm glad it worked."

"Except she reverted to a coma again." She was stealing a glance at her watch while she put on her coat. "You once said something about Laura Palmer having odd tastes in men. What did you mean?"

"Greg, I've got to go –"

"It's important. This has to do with Ronette."

"- I'm meeting some other women doctors for dinner. Harassed pediatricians' night out." He had his hand on her arm. It had been two days since their confrontation in his apartment (Hayward merely nodding, unperturbed, when he told him he would be staying), and as though it had never happened Amalie had grown distant again. Her usual cool self, harder than ever, with no intention apparently of making their affair public as she had seemed prepared to do.

"Ronette said these strange things," he told her. "I don't know what to make of it. She looked right at me and –"

"I've really got to go. You should talk to Cooper about it." She extricated her arm from his grip. At the door she gave him an odd glance back. "I'll see you tomorrow, Greg."

"Don't do this," he told her. For a moment they stood frozen, her eyes wide as though his words reverberated with other meanings, then she turned and left.

Burned. He wandered the halls until he came to the operating room on the second floor. The room was deserted and he leaned against the bed, rubbing his palms across the pristine sheets, until the frustration in him sublimed away and he no longer thought of Amalie's body there, standing so straight and compact waiting for him, or her voice with its roots all tangled through his heart wall. Until he could think of Ronette again, and the black place in his brain.

When he left the room evening had descended. The air in the hall seemed to emanate from a different sphere, the crisp night of outside suffusing the walls. The coming of winter. Fluorescent lights flickered, a bad sign for a hospital if it couldn't control power dips. Winter in the town probably knocked the lights out all the time. Good for them, even though he would be one of them this winter. Let them live in darkness.

He retrieved his coat from his office, still feeling cottony, eyes burning as though he had half hypnotized himself by staring so long at the white wall of the operating room. Except for Sheila standing at the desk, frowning down at her monitor, the lobby was deserted. A nurse exited the clinic jiggling a baby on her arm. "This damn thing –" Sheila muttered.

"Power's decided to make a bush stop," he told her as he halted to sign out. "Can't you see the way the lights are flickering?" Actually it was subtle, a subliminal hum in his corneas that was giving him a headache. The baby gazed at him over the nurse's shoulder – no, not at him, at someone behind him, big-eyed and intense the way tiny children got, and then it smiled. He turned around. There was no one there.

Sheila looked glassy-eyed. Her monitor was blank. "Try –" he started and then she sank into the chair, her large frame squeaking the wheels, so abruptly lethargic it alarmed him. "Sheila?" The nurse with the baby had left. "Hey –"

He was about to wave his hand in front of Sheila's face when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He spun.

Leland Palmer stood grinning at him. Impossible, because no one had been there seconds before – no, that had been the other direction, over toward the elevators. He could feel his heart in his chest like a drum roll.

"Dr. House?"

_Idiot_. Lawyers were scary, but not that scary. "Depends on who's asking."

Leland Palmer's hair (previously a humus brown that matched his own, he remembered from the funeral) had turned completely white. With his lawyer grin below the glittering obsidian eyes it proffered upon him the aura of a skull. A change from the grieving father that was so startling he felt his skin crawl. "I represent Mr. and Mrs. Pulaski, Dr. House. They plan to sue due to your actions earlier this evening regarding Ronette."

A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was eight. He had sat in the operating room for over an hour.

"Wow, now that's what I call fast. Do you work up that kind of speed from chasing ambulances?

"Could we talk in your office?"

He glanced at Sheila. Her odd bout of lethargy seemed forgotten. "Still some coffee in the main lounge," she told them.

"I won't be that long," Palmer grinned.

His office was cold. He sat across from Palmer and watched him take papers from his calfskin briefcase. Aside from what he suspected him of (that alone enough to keep his heart thumping and his skin crawling) the guy gave him the creeps. He reeked of oily lawyer. A tailored suit and silk tie, at eight in the evening. His own jeans and T-shirt felt rough in comparison, but he had his best brass-headed cane with him, not too shabby itself, and he laid it on the desk between them with a thud. Palmer smiled down at his papers and laid them out in front of him.

"Restraining order – you're not to come within fifty feet of Ronette. State Medical Board complaint and review request. First brief in a civil suit for damages. Letter to the D.A. in Seattle seeking criminal charges for wilful injury." The papers filled his desk. "I have more –"

"What happened to your hair?"

The smile vanished. "It went this way overnight."

Which, if true, he knew, would be a phenomenon beyond the pale of medicine. Terrible stress, over the course of three or four weeks, might have someone reaching for the Grecian Formula but no one's hair turned white overnight. It was a common myth. He supposed the guy might have been under enough strain since his daughter's murder not to have noticed a gradual change. The question being whether the strain was grief or the fear of being caught. He recalled something Hayward had said when he thought he wasn't interested, that Leland Palmer had been exhibiting wildly erratic behavior since the funeral, seeming to accept Laura's death one minute only to break down the next with sobbing fits in public. He reached out and inched his cane closer to him.

"Ronette was put at great risk by your actions, Dr. House. Now, we can talk about a settlement –"

"Did you know that, of all the professional groups, lawyers get elective surgery the least?" Palmer eyed him. "A study proved it. Can you guess why that is? Tell a doctor his patient is a lawyer and he won't touch him with a ten-foot scalpel. Too afraid of being sued. Better no operation than one that goes wrong."

"I'm sure we lawyers are all the healthier for being ignored by our doctors. Especially if they're like you."

"My point is that as soon as you involve lawyers every procedure suddenly looks risky in retrospect. They get their briefs in a wad about nothing." Palmer ran a hand through his freak hair. "What I did to Ronette was not risky."

"She's on a ventilator now."

"Not a consequence of the L-dopa. This is all about the parents not liking what they found out. They didn't like it being shoved in their faces that their daughter was working as a hooker. But it was necessary. There may actually be some information in what Ronette said that will help solve your daughter's murder." A cool breeze, as though someone had opened a door, brushed his neck. He realized he was sweating. Palmer's grin suddenly seemed plastered on. "This One-Eyed Jack's thing."

"The Jack's connection was already known, Dr. House. Agent Cooper in fact has been looking into some of the things going on up there - quite apart from…from Laura. Aside from the bordello and the unlicensed gambling, drug smuggling appears to have been high on their list. A man named Jacques Renault has even been a patient in your hospital here since a shoot-out with law officers at the casino yesterday. Renault was the owner of One-Eyed Jack's." The _was_, so lawyerly pedantic, made him squirm. "So, no, there was no information gained by your treatment of Ronette."

"Wow, this Jack's sounds like just the septic tank for the whole region, doesn't it?" He took an inner breath. "Tell me, does it bother you at all that your seventeen-year old daughter had her after-school job there? I mean, what kind of father were you – emphasis on the _were_ - if you were letting your daughter lead that kind of life?" Or forcing her to, to deal with whatever hell she faced at home.

He had read that if the magnetic poles of the earth were to shift as they had in the distant past scientists believe we would feel it, a pulse in the bones below sound. Leland Palmer's face had changed. He stared at a spot on the desk, just past the cane, then looked up, dark pupils like some inorganic material, glass or tar. The pulse was his own breath, he realized, the guy was borderline, he had pushed him over the edge -

Palmer leaned in. "You wanna play with fire?"

The hospital around them was deserted, the world, the universe. He could defend himself physically against anything less than psychotic. Fire. _He burned me_, he heard Ronette say, her beaten face near his, no, she had said, _He burned you_. He felt the press of water behind his eyes, so incongruous. The black place in his brain that was like a bruise.

"Because that is what you're doing, Dr. House. There's a good chance you will lose your medical license because of all this." Palmer leaned back, relaxed. He was the sane one. "If I have any say in it you will."

"Get out."

Palmer's grin gave the appearance now of a facial tic. He gathered his papers, leaving only the restraining order. "I'll see you in court, Dr. House."

_Where you will be the one charged with murder_. He didn't say it.

Alone in his office he tried to pull himself together. Fear, pure physical terror, was something he was unacquainted with. His heart was still racing. He popped a Vicodin to slow it. Coffee would be good, take the chill out. Sheila had mentioned some, and he rose, grabbed his cane –

- and threw it down with a yell -

_The brass head was burning hot._

He was shaking his hand, then staring at the unmarred skin. Wave after wave of nausea hit him. His palm was cool. The head of the cane when he snatched it up was as cold as the rest of the office and he dropped it again. He had backed up to the long windows that looked out on the wooded night and he could feel the frost through the glass numbing his shoulders. There were diseases that prevented the victim from telling hot from cold – neurological disorders, a brainstem stroke – but none that would make you feel heat in place of cold. So he was going insane. Should have seen it coming. Hallucinations. Lights that flickered and babies that smiled at no one.

He watched the office door with his back to the glass for a long time, until his breathing quieted and he could pick up his cane again without examining it.

His computer was still on and he sat, controlling his thoughts, and began to type. Insanity was not an option. Diagnose thyself, doctor. _Leland Palmer_ spewed out a long list of cases with which the bastard's name was associated through a Seattle firm, accomplishments only a lawyer could be proud of: takeovers, downsizes – all the measures by which the little guy in corporate America was constantly screwed, and all dating from before Palmer had moved upstate with his family, though the guy still played the shark in small waters, he saw, closing what had probably been very beneficial deals for the sawmill and the Great Northern only the year before. He went back farther, Leland Palmer in a high-school yearbook, a place called Pearl Lake, (who put these things on the net?), looking smarmy even then. Before that – nothing.

He didn't know what he was looking for. Anything, a reprieve from the thought that anyone could shake him up so much it could make him see things. Or feel things, in the case of his cane. He ran one finger absently over its brass head. The blue from the computer screen bathed his office. He typed in _Palmer_, got about a zillion hits, it should say that up there, he pondered, just have the screen say 'around a zillion, dude' in place of that unreadably huge number, he'd suggest it to the Google guys. He sighed. At least he was thinking like himself again. He tried _Palmer_ together with _Pearl Lake_.

The newspaper article was small. A boy of six, Laylon Palmer (the misspelling having kept it from popping up before, though it had to be Leland, every other fact checking out) had disappeared while playing near his home and was found a day later in one of the cabins up near the lake, having been driven there by a man he didn't know and held against his will. The boy was returned to his parents unharmed. In spite of the abductee's description, no suspect was found.

Twenty-four hours. One day, long ago in the life of a child. Early sixties. There would have been few questions asked back then, he knew. No psychological counseling. No one would want to know what games a pervert could get up to with a six-year old in the course of a day and night if it would mar the snow-glass purity of their world. A seed of evil buried in a child's soul, left to grow inward.

He shut down the computer. The dark places in his brain were throbbing. Another Vicodin, then he found his coat.

Sheila was still at the lobby desk, having apparently pulled the late shift though she didn't need to with her seniority. "We have a Jacques Renault here?" he asked her. She looked up the room for him, first floor near the back, then went with him to check on the young nurse in charge who tended to wander off on coffee breaks. He found Jacques Renault's room alone. Stood staring down too long at the slack body with a pillow over its face, his skin expanding to take it in, a feeling like dizziness of the limbs; his cottony detachment was back, he had a pillow over his own face perhaps, unable to act.

Then the nurse appearing in the door behind him screamed and Sheila ran in, saw the situation and gasped, "Oh don't touch it!" It shattered the spell. He tossed the pillow aside, started to check for a pulse, and saw the wide, useless eyes, the dots of red petechiae in the whites from asphyxiation. Monsieur Renault had been dead awhile. He leaned heavily against the bed and Renault's hand that had been clenched in a death grip beneath the pillow, as though the beery casino-owner had fought his smotherer with all his strength, slid down and flopped against him. Real flop, about as much flop as you could get.

"Oh doll, you shouldn't have touched anything."

………………………………………………………………………….

"You shouldn't have touched anything." Cooper studied him, and the dead man's room behind him, with a dazzling smile. "But I understand that you thought there might be some hope of reviving Renault." Behind him, Sheriff Truman grimaced. "You're a good man, Dr. House, and not the least because you saved my own life. I'd give my dictaphone to have you beside me in a crisis."

Cooper's breezy tone had resurrected his headache. He watched the experts dusting Renault's room, a pointless finger exercise as scores of doctors and nurses had likely entered the room to treat the patient. The corpse being carted away still sported a bandage on its shoulder from the bullet wound that had been its ticket to the hospital in the first place. The bandage seemed like a bad joke.

"People used to come to hospitals to get better," he said to no one in particular. "Oh well, times change." It reminded him of Ronette. "I woke up Ronette Pulaski earlier this evening, Agent Cooper." The agent nodded expectantly. "It seems she and Laura – "

"Coop." A man in charge of the fingerprint dusters called and Cooper turned away, saying "Hold that thought, Dr. House."

He found himself leaning in the doorway with Truman. Sheriff Truman had never occupied his thoughts, merely a black-hatted shadow attached to Cooper's heels. The sheriff, still gazing at the room, suddenly asked: "Do you believe in the supernatural, House?"

_Ah, the cardboard dummy speaks_. "Why should I? The natural itself is hard enough to believe in most of the time."

"Did you know we're looking into that kind of thing? The supernatural and all. I mean, Coop is. I would never have believed it before, but I've seen some things the past few weeks…" He might have been talking to himself. "We've discovered there's a demon in this town."

He wanted to run the guy's hat through a centrifuge. The only demon in the town was complacency. "Have you ever loved a woman, Sheriff?"

Truman glanced at him. "Yes."

"More than your own life?"

The glance became a gaze, wrapped up in thought. "Yes."

"And do you think that is supernatural?"

"No. it's the most natural thing in the world."

He could almost admire the honesty. They watched Cooper direct his team for a moment. "Humans are capable of great love," he told Truman, "but they're capable of great evil too. There's nothing supernatural about that. It's all too natural." The beast in us. "That's why I don't believe in hocus-pocus."

"You haven't seen what I've seen on this case."

_Maybe I have_. Cooper approached. "There are video cameras on the main doors. We'll want the footage."

"There was a power problem earlier," House told him. "You might not get anything." Cooper beamed at him, good news and bad equally cause for joy, but Sheriff Truman assumed his prior grimace of suspicion. "Funny," he muttered. They started to turn away.

"Agent Cooper, Ronette talked about One Eyed Jack's when I woke her." They paused. "She and Laura worked there."

Cooper turned back. "And that surprised you, Dr. House?"

"Shouldn't it be surprising when a seventeen-year old is taking after-school classes in how to pick up johns?"

"Nothing surprises me in this world, Dr. House. No, I just mean the connection to Jack's. You are seeing Amalie Parker, aren't you?"

There were times you could be glad not to have a heart monitor on you for all to see. Not to have to swallow to get words out. "What…do you mean?"

"I thought that - the two of you being on intimate terms like that - she would have…" Cooper's voice trailed off, "…told you." He saw his mistake. "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. House." For the first time the agent seemed more human than G-man. Embarrassed. Seeing him perhaps for the first time as another man. Truman had turned away. "It's just well-known among certain men in town who visit Jack's and I thought…" Cooper's eyes were large. "I just assumed you knew."

He felt his leg pain, magnified a hundred times; as though his thigh had grown to encompass him he was nothing but that throbbing mangled sinew of flesh; it pushed blood through his brain and beat his heart for him. A fool's heart. An idiot stripped naked and what a laugh he was, except that the eyes on him in his storming thoughts were not those of the half-strangers around him, but rather – oddly - Cuddy's and Wilson's, his fellows'. As though he had never left Jersey. Their gazes held pity.

Cooper still studied him. His look must have been a shock even to a hardened FBI agent. "I'm really very sorry, Dr. House," he murmured, then turned and left.

He found his cane and stumbled into the night, got in his car (a lost moment to decide, staring at the bare trace of his reflection in the windshield) then headed north, toward the border.

…………………………………………………………………….

End of Chapter 3

(A/N: Lots of TP in this. As one reviewer pointed out it's getting hard to juggle the logical House world with the supernatural one of Twin Peaks. I'd love any comments you might have, especially any TP fans out there, on how you feel this is working… Thanks for reading so far !)


	4. Chp4 Fall from Grace

THE FALLS

Chapter 4 – _Fall from Grace_

Wilson had told him once that love – true love – was the refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

The forest rushed by as he drove, northern firs caging the lonely highway. The moon chased him.

The oncologist had been talking about a case he had, a man who refused to allow his fatally ill wife to go home and die, browbeating her into fighting to the end instead, but Wilson's words had fallen into him, as they sat there in his office, still on the third floor back then, a year before his infarction, and had taken bitter root. Stacy (ah, but he couldn't think about Stacy now, the night pressing his windshield so reminiscent of her eyes, the place to which his highway led a vanishing point, as though once arrived he would cease to exist) – Stacy who near the end had said _All you know of love is power, Greg_.

A rest-stop where he might have turned and headed back loomed out of the night, a gouge of gravel road looping through the trees, and he passed it going eighty.

Where do you stop fighting for someone and let their will take over, he had wanted to ask her. Was it love to let someone walk away?

After Cooper's remark he had driven to Snoqualmie Falls, his thoughts as churned as the mountains of water shooting past the ridge, and had watched the mist claw upward. Waiting for a sign perhaps, thinking of his hands in Amalie's hair. Knowing no sign would be forthcoming.

The turnoff that Lubovsky, with grumbling-bear embarrassment, had described to him shot out of the night, the clapboard church on the corner, and he braked hard and turned. Another ten miles on a smaller road, the trees so near their branches seemed to reach for him, the cage closing in, then he came out onto a large parking lot before a rambling two-story structure that might once have been a barn. Audis mingled with junkheaps in the parking spaces. A flickering neon sign over the innocuous door told him he had found One-Eyed Jack's.

Men came and went without looking at one another. A teenager just exiting braced his hands on the wall, as if fearful the place would tumble down on him, and puked beer across his cowhide boots. Inside, the lowlife growing from the barstools studied him. No casino in sight. He had stopped at an ATM back in town for some large bills, anticipating a filtering system, and now he flicked his wad with the fifties at the bartender, who nodded and directed him straight past the bar to a back door.

The crowd in the casino was a different one, the music unobtrusive. Chandeliers lit red satin. Croupiers smiled at him. He watched a roulette wheel turn for awhile, drawing in the scent of good cologne and desperation, the sweat of men losing too much money, then made out the floorman, also unobtrusive, who would be the second step in the filtering system. Flicked his money at him and was accompanied to another door, which had to be unlocked and revealed a lushly carpeted stairway to the second floor. He peeled off a fifty and stuffed it in the guy's shirt pocket. Personal favor time. "I want a redhead," he told him.

The room he was led to was baroque lace, red and gilt dominated by the obscenely large bed in the center. He stood with his back to the door waiting, studying a long view of himself in the ornate mirror. He felt the brass head of his cane, like ice as he leaned on it, his hands cold. His breathing didn't seem to be working right. He had misunderstood Cooper, that was it. Some redhead would come in, no resemblance even to Amalie, and he wouldn't be able to do it with her, a cool five-hundred out the window, because his balls felt sucked up into his abdomen with the pressure, disgust presenting as a near-violent spasm, a withdrawal, and not only there, a tightness further up in his chest. Could a heart shrivel up and die? Good question, doctor.

Then the door opened and Amalie slipped in (he watched in the mirror, blinked once), still patting down the sexy-nurse costume she wore, oblivious to him, white skirt so short it flashed a hint of pantyless buttocks, a halter top that left the nipples free and pinched upward, pink and inviting, stupid nurse-cap on hair that fell to her shoulders. A memory of her bra strap flitted through his mind, as though it mattered anymore, that bit of white peeking out, so private, how the intimacy had seemed solely for him, while she had been leaving the hospital in the evenings to come here and let it all hang out for strangers. No, his heart wasn't dead - it was beating hard with rage, something inside him already shouting at her, then she turned and saw him, their eyes meeting in the mirror. She gasped.

The look she wore - not embarrassment, more a longing to die rather than know he had seen her like this – left him speechless, because it meant she cared. Cared what he thought. It meant everything, the reason she was shaking her head, her hand on her mouth in horror, turning back to the half-open door, as though having only appeared to him in a mirror she could make it unhappen if she just left, make him think it was a dream, then he was spinning, yelled "_Stop_!" and she froze.

He hobbled to her. Slammed the door with his cane. She wouldn't look at him, twisting to avoid his eyes, a rabbit in a trap, small half-sobs saying, "Please, no," that cut below his shouted words.

"What is it, Am? What is _wrong_ with you?" He tried to take her arm, too much force. "Look at you –" She broke away. The nurse cap fell to the floor. "You're a _doctor_, for chrissake!" The words sounded like vomit, nausea and rage contorting the muscles of his face until it hurt. "You're an intelligent beautiful woman – what the _fuck_ are you doing here?"

"Just leave me alone! You didn't have to come here, dammit – why couldn't you have just stayed away?" She sounded like a child. Her eyes fell on his, tears big, and she leaned back against the door, beating at his hands that plucked the costume in disgust. "Oh why couldn't you have left things the way they _were_?" The _were_ was a wrenched sob.

"Oh right!" So loud he scared himself. They would come for him in a minute, throw him out bodily when they saw he wasn't there for business. "I was supposed to take my closet tidbits from you when I could get them, right? When all I was getting was sloppy seconds! From loggers who'd had it in you the night before. God_damn _you, Am!" She was shaking with sobs. "Goddamn you – I should have left town when I had the chance -"

"No," she moaned.

"The guy at the hospital who was rude to you-" he saw in her sudden grimace that he was right – "he wasn't making those snide remarks because he'd heard rumors. He'd _been_ here. With you." Revulsion left him weak. He leaned one hand against the wall. "Jesus _Christ_." Fools didn't come any bigger than him. You got suckered in by the ones just fucked-up enough to hide it, why was that, you got used to lips on yours like it meant something, the press of a body so sweet against you it makes you want to cry because you haven't had much good in life. Because it feels so right for once. "Why?" His voice came out gravelly. She was crying so hard she couldn't speak, her eyes – so suddenly like Laura Palmer's - saying _Please don't_. "It was insane enough to imagine Laura Palmer coming up here. But you…" Another sob escaped her. "You don't need the money for some coke habit. You're not fucked up inside like her. What kind of sick thing do you get out of this, Am? Please, just tell me, I have to know."

She was muttering below her tears. He had to quiet his breathing to hear her. "I am, I am." So much an echo of what she had said in his apartment that it froze his blood. "I _am_ sick inside. Oh please I – I think I'm insane. Oh Greg help me, I think I'm going crazy."

His arms were around her before he knew what was happening. Her crying wet his shirtfront. Slowly the tears subsided, becoming only breathy hiccups between which she mumbled things that might have been explanations, "I don't know" and once, "The pain." Images still raced through his mind, the same pictures of male hands on her that had plagued him when he thought she was seeing someone else, but magnified now a hundred times, men who tore at her clothes or bent her over their laps and spanked her, anything they wanted to do because they'd paid for the power over her. He tried to shut them out. Power was something else. He put his mouth near her ear and rocked her gently. "Talk to me, Am."

They sat on the absurd bed. She hugged herself, cradling her hands under her arms, and moaned, "Don't look at me."

"I'll look at you if I want to. I paid for it."

She gazed away for moments, until he thought she wouldn't speak. The depth of their silence funneled the sounds from other rooms to them, a client going at it, the bed squeaking, muffled laughter. When she spoke, her one word shocked him. "Power." His chest burned. "Some people think love is power. I was married to a man like that."

His throat clenched. Maybe he didn't want to know.

"I met Garret in college. We were the perfect couple. From the outside at least. From the inside, well, there were things that bothered me, but he was so suave and smart and the sex was…_incredible_." No, he didn't want to know. "Then we were married. It was all so perfect. But, after a few years, the things that bothered me started to – take over. Garret had always had an arrogant streak, machismo, and suddenly the sex had to be…demeaning."

He stayed very quiet.

"I was so insanely in love with him still, that I let it slip. I became someone who would do –" her breath seemed to run out " – _anything_ for him. He slept with other women. He didn't care if I knew. He hurt me – physically – in ways that wouldn't show and I let him, I _wanted_ him to because I thought it would keep him with me." Her eyes, gazing at nothing across the room, were huge. "I was sick. On the outside this successful, with-it doctor, and on the inside just…rotting. Loving someone who only knew that one way to express it." The sounds from the other room had stilled, the client having shot his wad. "Then I got pregnant."

Her voice was a dull hollow. He had his hand on her arm.

"It was a shock, an accident, but I became obsessed with this stupid _stupid_ idea it would change everything, that we would suddenly be like other couples, a family. When she was born, she was so beautiful, you can't imagine. A beautiful tiny…" A shudder ran beneath her skin. "When she was three months old I killed her."

The words seemed to come from another place, a corner of the room, so that he almost looked away. He thought he had heard wrong.

"Garret's fooling around became worse after the birth. I had changed; I didn't want to play his power games anymore, I was obsessed with thinking we could be normal. He got farther and farther away from me and it was killing me. One Saturday afternoon, while the baby was napping." For a moment it seemed she wouldn't go on. "While the baby was asleep, we had a fight that ended up in bed. The first time in a long time. It was better - _worse_ – than it had ever been, and I let him do it all because I was so happy for that attention. Because it meant he was back with me. It meant I was the one. I let him hurt me and humiliate me and he lost himself in it, like some kind of demon was riding him, and I was glad. I remember it running through my head, _He loves me, he loves me_, like a mantra. All that power - it was as though he was sucking it out of me, out of the air around us." Her whisper was so low, a wind far away in trees, that he had to watch her lips. "Feeding on hurt. When it was over, we both went to sleep. Isn't that strange?" She turned to him, barely seeing him through tears. No, he wanted to say, then realized she was trying to comprehend the long-gone moment, palpate it as a doctor might a lump, looking for the malignancy, a moment that had defined her life ever after. "We slept for hours. When I woke up I remember wondering why the baby wasn't crying. When I went in…she was dead."

He thought he had never heard words spoken with such sadness. Her head was bowed, red curls falling, wet with tears, around her face, and he thought how he had never wanted to see her hair down like that. He leaned his head into her shoulder. "Oh Am." _You didn't kill your child_.

"She was…cold." She gave a tortured shrug. "Crib death. That tells you nothing, you know? It can mean anything. She was born healthy, normal birth weight. They never found any reason. They just said she must have been dead for…hours." She paused, locked in horror. "About the time we were doing it."

"You didn't kill your baby, Am."

"It happened while I was doing those things with Garret. Caught up in trying to hold onto something that was sick and dying anyway. All caught up in my own _needs_."

"It's the survivor complex. Death is incomprehensible, someone has to be at fault, and so you make it yourself. What about –" - he didn't want to say the name – "your husband? Wasn't he at fault more than you?"

"He pretended to care for a while, but he didn't. We got divorced three months later. I quit my job, threw some things in the car and just drove." _So familiar_. "The first week, in a motel room, I –" She fumbled at the white-lace cuff that had replaced her leather armband in the nurse costume, hiding the scar. "I thought I couldn't go on, but when I made the first incision…something stopped me." She was lost in memory again. "Something black in the corner of the room. I walked out, to the motel office, to get help. The nice kid there, I scared her to death, dripping blood and shouting at her to call 911. And when that was all over, I just – drove again."

"And ended up in the woods."

She was looking at him now, challenging. "I went through every available man in town here the first few years, Greg."

"I know."

"I'm not sure why. I was looking for something. It wasn't love, I had decided I would never have that because I didn't deserve it. I think I was hoping for the opposite of love, another Garret maybe, who would make me feel so bad about myself that I would start living again inside just to defy it. I was dead, you know. A patient in the clinic told me where she had got her fingers broken. I think she saw something in my eyes, because she slipped me Jacques' phone number."

They had come full circle, to the thing he couldn't talk about, all the questions he _wouldn't_ ask her: how often she drove up, how many times she had slipped into a room to find – as she had with him – that it was someone she knew. How she could have kept on. As though awakening from her story into his, he became aware again of his heart, still thudding with anger. How she could have kept on once she started seeing him.

"You think I'm sick, don't you?" She was challenging again, and at the same time pleading. "You want to know why letting men do anything they want to me would stop the pain? How I could keep coming up here when you and I –"

His hand hard on her wrist stopped her. "Just don't."

She jerked her hand back. "I want to. I want you to know. How everything started to – change after I met you." He closed his eyes. "You were the first man in years to look at me like I was a – a person. Something real." The word she was looking for was _respect_, he wanted to tell her. "I was in denial about you. I thought I had to punish myself for even thinking I could be happy with someone. _I had to keep coming here_." He thought of her look, always surprised after their sex, as though afraid to admit it made her happy, and the pain burst inside him. No, you didn't have to keep coming here; something made you.

"I was so scared of you finding out, because I would lose that respect. I would lose _you_. When Benny Wright started saying those things in the hospital – when I thought he was going to say the truth right there in front of you – I was so scared that the only thing I could do was walk away. Do you know why I told you to meet me in the operating room right after that? I thought I could just get you out of my system by doing you, by being a slut with you like I had with every other man, just get it over with and I'd stop feeling what I did for you." He couldn't look at her. "But it didn't work. I fell in love with you. I love you, Greg."

If a heart could hold anger and joy – stunned exploding joy – at the same time, then her words did it. You could hate someone for hurting you, he supposed, want to slap them and at the same time yearn to put your arms around them and crush them right through your skin because their words mean so much. He felt his hands on the edge of the bed and told himself he wouldn't move.

"You see now why I – I wanted you of all people not to order me around." _Yes_. "Tell me I'm morally bankrupt."

He tried to control his voice. "You're morally bankrupt."

She looked like he'd slapped her, then she looked down, relinquishing the moment, and fumbled again with the lace cuff. "You know, sometimes I think maybe I really died in the suicide attempt. That this is hell, this town."

"'The devil made me do it'? There's no Satan that made you do these things, Am." With his head he indicated the room.

"There is. Something here in these woods. As though there's something evil in the ground. People used to believe that if God was in heaven, then Satan was in the earth. I've sensed it here. Like a damp…rot. One that can rise up and make people sick. I come here to Jack's more often when there's fog between the trees."

The statement was so odd it chilled him, as odd as every other insane moment that had happened to him since Ronette's awakening. "And they used to cut up bodies looking for the soul," he told her. "Never could grab onto the slippery little bugger, though. Now we have MRIs and it still beats our pair of aces." She was watching him. "Maybe they should have looked for the devil inside us." That was where it was, wrapped around their intestines or behind their hearts. The black place in his brain. They had come from the ground, mud and clay, and a seed had been encapsulated in them as they evolved, a bit of root caught twisting at their cores, dirty and spewing poison. Or growing into a devouring beast, as it must have in Leland Palmer. Insane thoughts, that left him tired.

"It's in you too," she murmured. It was as though she read his mind. "You know who murdered Laura, but you do nothing about it. Palmer drugged his wife so he could rape his daughter at night, had probably been doing it for years, until it got out of control and he killed his own child. You have the tox screen that shows the mother was slipped something, but instead of just talking to the FBI agent, you drug the guy so you can plant a hypnotic suggestion in him." Her voice was matter-of-fact, as tired as he felt, no longer challenging. "Make him think in the right direction. Then you wake up Ronette to question her and you don't even make sure there are any real witnesses there in case she says something important." She turned to him. "Don't you see? It's the same…impulse that drove me here again and again. It's what makes you shy away from what you know. That keeps that brain of yours from working right."

"That puts me to sleep," he murmured. Lights were going off in his head, an image of himself kneeling by Cooper's bed as though drugged himself, Sheila slumping into lethargy as Palmer entered the hospital. A pillow, so soft as to be intangible, smothering them all. Fog. The log lady had said it: they all slept too well. "I spoke to Leland Palmer tonight," he told Amalie. "I think he killed Jacques Renault." The thought that the beast fogging his senses had kept him from seeing that connection earlier was frightening.

She was staring. "Jacques Renault is _dead_? But he only had a shoulder wound from the raid–"

"Someone tried to make him eat a pillow earlier this evening while the nurse was out buffing her nails. It had to be Palmer. He must have thought that if Laura's aberrant lifestyle got out, they might start looking at him as a suspect. Or maybe Renault knew he was lurking around here after Laura that night." Another memory startled him. "Amalie – Leland Palmer was in the Great Northern Hotel the night Cooper was shot. I saw him walk by a minute before I went up and found Cooper in his room." The lights in his head hurt. She was leaning into him like a child, part of the blood-red silk sheet drawn up to cover her breasts. They were as spent as though they had screwed, he realized.

"Go to Cooper," she whispered.

He looked at the baroque clock on the table by the bed, a porcelain shepherd and shepherdess doing it doggy-style or, he supposed, sheep-style. It said two a.m.

"Tomorrow," he told her. "First you're walking out of here and coming to my place with me. And you're making sure they understand here that you're never coming back." She seemed to be falling into his gaze. "Right?" For a moment he thought she wouldn't answer, then something like peace spread across her face. She nodded. "If you can't tell them, I will."

"Oh, no, Greg. You can't let them know why you came here. If you try to assert some kind of right to me, they'll beat you up." Her voice said she'd seen it before. "Go out the way you came. I can tell them I'm sick and leaving early. They'll let me. I'm…valuable. I'll change and get my car out of the back and meet you."

He would have to let her. Relinquish that power, to gain it back. He took his hand from her arm and nodded.

Back out through the bar and to his car, firs that made blue-black skeletons in the moonlight while the lights of Amalie's car following behind skittered over him like a beacon, then they were on his lumpy mattress, holding one another, no thoughts of eroticism, bodies falling to sleep against each other. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. "Say it again," he whispered, almost ashamed. Like a child begging for a treat.

"I love you."

……………………………………………………………………….

Fog lay heavy on the road in the morning. The police station was a low-slung building set among firs at the farthest reach of the main road. Lights were on in the back. It was six a.m. The hotel had told them Cooper went to work early.

Amalie waited in the car. He was directed by a shocked-hair and painfully inept deputy to a conference room where Cooper and Truman bent over documents while a blond secretary took notes. The table held more donuts than he had ever seen in one place outside a donut shop.

"You expecting the entire Seattle police force?"

Cooper looked up, pleased. "Dr. House. You're up and out early. Could I interest you in a bear claw?"

"You can take a flying fuck at your donuts." The blond girl's mouth fell open. "I'm here to tell you something. I want you to listen."

While he spoke, the tension draining from him with the words, Cooper studied the tox screen of Sarah Palmer he had handed him. He told them of Laura's odd reaction in the clinic room to the suggestion her mother might have been drugged and Ronette's hysterical words that could only be memories of the night of the murder. "Leland Palmer killed his daughter." Cooper looked at him. "He was abusing her, it got out of hand, maybe when he found out she worked at One Eyed Jack's, and he waited till she left there one night and followed her. He was probably all wrapped up in his little sex slave and couldn't take the jealousy –" The secretary looked down in dismay.

"Leland's a respected member of this town," Truman spit out.

Cooper's hand on the sheriff's arm told him who was in charge. "Our lead doesn't point that way, Dr. House."

"What lead – the demon one?" He eyed Truman.

"Why, yes."

He longed to swat the barely interested smile off Cooper's face, preferably with his cane. "Listen to me. A murder like this, _everyone_ looks into the family first, everyone in the normal world out there would suspect the father as a matter of routine, everywhere except in this damn toontown. So what world are you living in? His wife was being drugged, in her home, night after night, and I've just shown you proof –"

"But everyone lies, Dr. House." Cooper shrugged. "Sarah Palmer could well have been lying about having taken it herself. It does not constitute proof of anything." He laid the tox screen aside.

"Dammit, you're all asleep! You can't be that numb to things around you. There's something wrong with this town!"

"I would be the first to agree with you."

"But you go off looking for dreams and demons and –"

"Dr. House, there is a demon loose in this town. If he's in Leland Palmer at present, as you seem to think, we'll find that out. But the demon's presence permeates the town. How else would you explain Amalie Parker - possibly the most intelligent woman in a hundred-mile radius – working up at One-Eyed Jack's? You did go and find her there, didn't you?" Cooper paused. Truman was pretending not to grin behind a donut he had brought to his mouth.

_Damn you all_. His cane was up before he knew it. One swipe across the table and plates of donuts careened onto the floor, sending sugar glaze and jelly across the papers and shattering china. They leaped out of the way, a shout popping from Truman. The girl backed into the corner, eyes wide.

"Yes, goddamit it, and that has nothing to do with it!"

Cooper's frown lasted less than a second, then he was smiling again. He dusted sugar from his pants. "Dr. House, I am conducting this case to the best of my ability. You apparently think I'm missing something."

"Yeah, a brain!" His hand was still tight on his cane.

"Leland's not in town anyway now, should I even want to question him. I've been told he left last night to stay at Pearl Lake a while, where he grew up." His rage shriveled inside him, a phrase beating like a bad song in his head, _You're a fool for coming_. "Laura's death has been hard on Leland, Dr. House. He needed a rest. But I wouldn't arrest him anyway. There's nothing to indicate this is a family matter. There was a very similar murder down the coast a while back, and now another girl is missing from town here. It forms a series."

He watched the secretary creep back to her chair near him, avoiding his gaze as she might that of a rabid Doberman. She started picking up donuts. Outside the window the dawn was still half dark. Passing car lights flashed by. He felt tired. "Someone's missing?" he echoed.

"Maddy Ferguson. Laura's cousin from out of town. She stayed with the Palmers a while after the funeral. She left town here last night, but never arrived home in Seattle."

"Oh, Leland's really keeping it in the family, isn't he?" No response. "You said you had leads, Agent Cooper?" _Go on and cave, you fool. Go along with their inane theories_.

"In communication with the spirits –" he groaned and it seemed to fuel Cooper's enthusiasm – "I've been told we have to look for someone named Bob. This Bob may manifest as a spirit himself or take over and act through a human, much the way a _mara_ does." Cooper held out a paper from the table and brushed chocolate glaze from it. It was a police sketch of a man, gauntly intense, the features blank and yet somehow contorted with what one might have termed hunger, or sadistic amusement. He looked about forty. Hair, which the artist had streaked to represent gray, hung to his shoulders.

He felt his stomach tense. "Where did you get this picture?"

"Both Sarah Palmer and I have had visions about Bob and we worked with the artist."

"That can't be. I've seen this guy around town." The room froze; in the silence he could hear his own breath. His heart – that had stilled after his donut demolition - was racing again. He grasped at the elusive memory. Night wind in the trees, a car pulling away from a curb. "This guy's not from a vision. He was here in town…" Agent Cooper's knowing look dawned on him. All of them were watching him, he realized, as he might have gazed at a dying patient who was in denial. "_No_." He banged his cane on the table. No one jumped. "No, I am _not_ having visions. You'd love to co-opt me into your insane, supernatural humbug, wouldn't you?" Cooper smiled. "Well, you can take your mysticism and cram it up your donut-holes – this guy's real, whoever murdered Laura is real, and it's as simple as that!"

"Then you've had no unusual experiences since this started, Doctor?" The question, so matter-of-fact, was one he couldn't answer because the images suddenly flooding his head had slipped down his throat and were threatening to choke him: his trance at Cooper's bedside, the stupefying moment in the hospital when the wind-up toy of reality had seemed to wind down as Palmer entered the lobby. His cane burning his hand. No, it wasn't that simple, because his brain hadn't been working right from the start, a cancer in it breaking open and spewing poison, something from the past buried so deep he hadn't been consciously aware of it, but if that was the supernatural, then he was the surgeon general. No, it was only himself, the same way Leland Palmer in some psychotic way was this Bob and probably had been since a man named Bob had raped him as a child. The incredible power of memory and experience locked deep in everyone, for good or evil. Not the supernatural – the _sub_natural. Depths.

No satan inside. Only us.

He realized he had been staring at the floor for several moments. They probably thought he was praying. "No," he whispered. He looked up, and then louder: "_No_." Cooper seemed pleased. "This is not about the supernatural." His words rang through the room. "This is about a father who raped and murdered his own daughter. It's _real_, it's possible, it happens in the real world. You want to create an excuse for the guy by referring to some vague evil that got inside him somehow? Give it a name – Bob – like you might a pet rock? Go ahead and do it. Call it psychosis or brutalization – but _don't call it the supernatural_."

"And where did Bob come from?"

Was there an answer? Bob was created in a cabin at the edge of a lake, in the act of evil perpetrated on a child… He tried to remember the news article about Palmer's kidnapping. And if the evil had been in the rapist to start with, where had that come from? Himself abused perhaps, twisted… A spiral of violence stretching backward into the past and forward forever. It made him dizzy.

"These spirits inhabit us," Cooper intoned, "and some call them psychoses or mental illness. Look at it your way or look at it mine. The effect in the 'real' world is the same. Laura is dead." Humanness leaked through his voice, a sadness. "Maybe Maddy Ferguson too. We've been told by a spirit that Bob is inhabiting someone here who is in a house of wood with many rooms. That that is where we have to look."

"We thought of the Great Northern Hotel," Truman piped up. His eyes narrowed. "But if you leave out the wood part, that could be the hospital, couldn't it? Got a lotta rooms."

Cooper threw the sheriff a humoring grimace. Some theory (but they couldn't mean that) which the FBI agent did not entirely concur in. "You're new here, Dr. House." (Oh yes they could mean it). "If the father's the first to be suspected, then the out-of-towner is the next. You're the man from another place. And you were present at both my shooting and Renault's murder." His voice was firm but sad. "You do see, don't you?" He saw that they seemed to recede as his perspective shifted, hunter and hunted not what he had thought. His breath was fast again. "You always seem to be where something is happening, doctor, sneaking around to give unauthorized treatments – to me, to Ronette, our only witness, who because of you is now in a coma beyond reach. You conveniently find Jacques Renault and move items, ensuring your fingerprints will be on everything–"

"He might have still been alive –"

Truman's voice was grim. "Sheila said the monitors had flatlined. There was no need to disturb the scene."

They blurred in his view and he realized he was shaking his head, in a jerky movement that was almost a twitch. "Leland Palmer was there too, both times. I saw him in the hotel before Cooper was shot, and he was at the hospital last night." His shuddering breath made him sound like a recording. He wouldn't have believed himself if he were them.

"Which you've amazingly failed to mention so far. Why, even there in the hospital last night, one would think that item of information would have come up." _Something held me back, confusing me_. "You see, do you not, doctor, that this insistence on Leland Palmer, a man beyond reproach, could simply mean to us that you are trying to draw attention away from yourself? That we have to take that into account?" Cooper's gaze was hard. "My dream did show me a tall man who was really a midget." For a moment he seemed lost in thought. "A midget spirit crouched down inside him."

"Amalie Parker –" His alibi the night of Laura's death.

"Dr. House, when did you first come to Twin Peaks?"

Another shift in perspective. It was the end of their casual conversation and the first question in an interrogation. The sudden certainty that they had been watching and discussing him for some time.

_You're being controlled_, he wanted to scream at them. Don't you see that? And yes, if it meant he had to believe in spirits – though he would have called it lethargy, the evil inherent in them trusting Palmer's white-washed facade and automatically distrusting the stranger – then it meant the spirit of the place was misdirecting them. The magician's trick, make sure they concentrate on the wrong hand, the wrong suspect, while the culprit vanishes.

If they suspected him, it meant they were without any will or knowledge at all.

They were so still, the three facing him, they might have been a tableau. Puppets had no will. They played the roles assigned them. He had to take control. "Doesn't matter when I came here," he answered Cooper's question very slowly and clearly. "Because I'm leaving now." He had begun to back up. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the door. "I'm walking out of here. I hope you understand that."

The only movement in the room was Cooper's head tilting, the bird-like frown.

More than puppets. The buzzing in his head made it hard to think, their sudden quiet, even the sounds from the road beyond the window hushed. He had the sudden insane thought that they did not exist outside of him, that once he walked out, they would freeze in their positions, like a paused tape, as they already seemed to be doing. Winding down. Add solipsism to your symptoms of insanity, doctor. "Yes, a hospital has a lot of rooms," he heard himself saying. No response. His backward steps had reached the door. He turned and caned his way, trying not to think, or to think only of reaching Amalie, past gray halls and doors (had he come that far into the station?) until he stood on the front steps, the light thickening overhead into day that looked as if it might turn stormy, a normal overcast morning in the real world.

Amalie was not in the car.

…………………………………………………………………………..

The treetops swayed with a rhythm she knew.

She stood at the edge of the forest and watched them. Her heart had almost stopped. The moment she had slipped through the door at Jack's, already burying her own identity deep inside, where it would be safe from degradation, as she always did, until it was over – and then seeing him, the shape in the mirror so unmistakable…she had known then what it was to have a heart simply stop dead because it couldn't go on. What it meant to not want it to go on, because it would be easier to die than to face him. A feeling she hadn't known for years, not since she had stood over a crib and shaken a tiny shoulder in horror. Knowing the irretrievable slipping away.

He had stood shouting at her for so long, or it had seemed so long, the shock on his face like a scalpel, words stabbing, while she had wanted him to take her in his arms and say he understood, that it had become another, more perfect punishment. He was purging her, drawing the poison. And it had all come out.

She felt new. Saying 'I love you', she had seen the look on his face before he could hide it, happiness gushing like an orgasm, blue eyes wide and soft, and she had known they were in a new world. One where the spell of evil on her was broken. One where he forgave her.

The forest before her rustled. It had beckoned as she sat waiting in the car, thinking about him, the fact that he would stay with her after all, and she had got out and walked the fifty yards to the forest's dark edge.

Watching the trees sway in the rising wind.

She saw Greg come out of the police station and stop at the sight of the empty car, his mouth open. She had never seen him frightened before. He hobbled to the passenger side and pressed his hands against the window. _I'm right here_, she wanted to call. _I'm not going away._

"Greg –"

He spun. Relief flooded his face, and then a wary gaze beyond her to the vast black wall of fir behind her, as though he thought it might swallow her up, so odd it made her feel like one of those heroines in an old horror flick, always too dumb to grasp the warning of the monster creeping up behind them, the mummy or the werewolf; in a moment a horrendous hand would descend on her shoulder. She turned. Nothing was there.

He seemed to collect himself and hobbled to her. "A storm's coming," she told him, as though it explained why she had left the car. Wind blew a strand of her hair loose and he tucked it back for her. He seemed agitated. They stood for a moment watching the woods. "Sometimes, when I've been driving back from Jack's –" she felt him tense – "I've seen lights in the trees, where no road could be."

"Smugglers. Canadian drug runners." She waited for him to go on. "They didn't believe me." The rising wind threatened to drown his voice. Whatever had happened in the police station had not been good. "They – let me know they suspect me instead."

She stared. "That's insane."

"Of course it's insane."

"But I could tell them that we… I'll go in now and tell them."

"No." His hand on her arm stopped her. "Why would they trust you? You're a hooker." The casual way he said the word hurt. She couldn't look at him. "Cooper already thinks you're some kind of schizo. And it wouldn't matter anyway. There's something…wrong with them. They're drugged, like all the rest of the town. It's in the donuts or the pie or the coffee." _Or the ground_. She remembered their conversation from the night before. No, he wouldn't accept that, he had to have a material explanation. "I said to Krumberg once that it was encephalitis lethargica, but it's something worse." He was shaking his head. "Are other places like this?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I was in my glass tower of a hospital so long, Am. I don't know what the real world's like anymore. Do they ignore evil like this in other places? Is it so hard for people to combat it?" He seemed to be asking himself. There was no answer.

A gust of wind shook them hard and bent the firs. "Come away from the trees," he told her. Superstitious after all. They weren't going to eat me, she almost said.

They sat in the car and watched the light-dawning day darken again with storm clouds. "Most people are broken in some way, Greg."

"I know that."

"You and I are…more broken than most. It's why we ended up in this broken town." She thought of his infarction, as he had told her about it, the girlfriend who had left him when he needed her. But there was something else. "When that boy - your patient - died, Greg…" She didn't know how to express it. "You lost all your confidence. Everything you believed about yourself. You need to believe in yourself again. If you think you're right about Leland Palmer, don't let them change your mind." _Don't let this place change you_.

He stared at her for so long that she had to reach out and touch his face, as though to smooth the doubt away, and it seemed to decide him. He started the car and drove. She didn't ask. The road out of town was deserted and they hit the highway without seeing a car. The first drops of rain spattered the windshield. It didn't matter where they were going, only that they shared this space, silent beside each other and sealed from the world outside. She watched his hands on the wheel, still tense. "It's all about children, isn't it?" she murmured. He covered his surprise. "About the children who died while we were supposed to be taking care of them." For him, she suspected, it was more than his patient in Princeton, something much older, so deep it was as buried as death, but she wouldn't say that; they weren't that far and might never be. She remembered his incoherent ramblings after she had woken him from his trance at Cooper's bed. Child sacrifice, he had said. Yes, that was it. Children sacrificed to adult problems, offered up, and abandoned. "Her name was Jade," she said. From the weight of his hands on the wheel, she knew he was listening hard. "She was so beautiful. I don't know why I was so…in love." Why the grief goes on. "She wasn't really a person yet, with a personality and all. She was just. Beautiful."

A turn-off rose before them and he pulled over and looked at the sign. It said Pearl Lake. "That's where Leland's gone," he told her. "I don't know what I plan to do. Confront him, bring him back. But I want to go there." It sounded insane. She would go where he went. She nodded.

They looked at each other for a long time, as if to acknowledge just how insane they really were, then he started the car back up and took the turn-off.

…………………………………………………………………………

End of Chapter 4

A/N: Reviews are always welcome. The next chapter is the last – thanks for reading !


	5. Last Chp The Black Lodge is Burning

"_If you face the Black Lodge with imperfect courage it will utterly annihilate your soul."_

Chapter 5 – _The Black Lodge is Burning_

_It's all about the children._

He drove through the whipping rain and thought of how insane they were, how crippled they both had to be to think they could redeem their pasts. She sat beside him, still and warm, a frown puckering her lips. _We're going to confront a possibly psychotic killer_, he wanted to make clear to her, _in order to make ourselves feel better_. Get our rocks off a little on that good-deed high. It sounded like a joke. We're going to save the children we lost, retroactively, you and me, baby: your baby and my patient, bring them back to life somehow by revenging Laura Palmer's abuse and death. So we can feel right about ourselves again.

She laid her hand beside his thigh on the seat, where it rubbed near his scar with each bump of the road, a tiny intimacy, and he looked at her and knew that it was not about his patient back in Princeton at all.

That ghostly boy with veins made of tissue paper – he couldn't even recall his name – was just that: a ghost, one that would haunt him forever, but it was not the breathing festering pit inside him that threatened to break open since the events after Laura's death. Memories that could not quite surface and that he knew he would disown if they did. She was right, it was about children, only one lay buried so deep in his past only Laura's murder could have massaged life back into it. What had he told Donna Hayward once? His landlord's daughter, Laura's friend, speaking to him in front of the house one morning after the murder, frightened at the thought of a killer on the loose. The same thing's not going to happen to you that happened to Laura, Donna, he had told her. It was closer to home than that.

So close to home it was filling his brain with poison. Threatening to annihilate him.

Pearl Lake lay forty miles away, through thick alder woods, a sleepy town (comatose, his rude side said), where the river balked and formed a lake miles up in the hills. Tiny enough for every sleepy inhabitant to know everyone else. Shop fronts on the one main street looked straight out of the fifties. Passers-by watched his car. He stopped at a gas pump and convenience store, dusty in spite of the rain that had fled, and Amalie accompanied him inside. The screen door creaked. The old man rising from a cane chair behind the counter creaked.

Did he know where he might find Leland Palmer? A scratch on the head. The old man's memory took its time rebooting. The Palmers had died, he finally informed him in a creaky voice, the place off the main street sold years ago. No, he was talking about their son, who was supposed to be back in town since the night before.

"Now I do recall a Leland. Couldn't tell ya where he might be though."

"He might be staying in a motel," Amalie chipped in.

If the town even had one. That would presuppose anyone wanting to hang around in the town more than twelve hours. The store owner was studying them in geriatric confusion. An idea occurred. "Do you recall a kidnapping here in the sixties?" he asked the man. Amalie stared. He hadn't mentioned his research to her. "A boy was taken up to a cabin by the lake and released after a few days."

The rheumy eyes narrowed. "I do indeed. Big scandal at the time. Up in the resort area it was. Most of those places burnt down in a big fire in the eighties. No one goes up there no more. I suppose the black lodge may be still standing."

He felt chilled. "The black lodge?"

"Well, that's where the man held that poor boy, isn't it? Ole' Bernie Black and his family never used the place after that and couldn't sell it. What you interested in the Black lodge for?"

Amalie's hand brushed his below the counter. She felt the same tension. "I'm thinking of buying the property," he said, though it felt as though he said _I'm buying the farm_. "Just a sucker for crime scenes. Think you could excavate some directions for me out of that archeological dig of a brain?"

…………………………………………………………………………..

The road snaked up through shady groves still sparkling with rain, growing narrow until it was only a chalky unmaintained trail flanked by arbutus, their heavy fleshy leaves slapping at the car windows. A sign, so old it made him think of archeology again, had told them the way led to Pearl Credence Resort. He splashed through rivulets and bumped over tree roots that crossed the road, scraping his muffler. Amalie braced against the bumps. "This is going nowhere," she murmured, and then: "You shouldn't have been rude," seconds before they leveled out into a clearing, the re-appeared sun bright on a small gravel drive, overgrown by weeds, that circled around before a ramshackle building with boarded windows.

The Black lodge was white, a wooden clapboard construction over a base of yellow limestone scored by fire marks in one corner. The slanting roof looked to be more holes than roof. A veranda at one end had crumbled down the hill toward the lake in the distance. Sword ferns grew around the front steps.

"Is anyone here?" Amalie whispered. He braked and pointed to a wood-chopping stump at the side of the house in which a rusty axe hung. The split log on the stump looked fresh, its insides gleaming pink. "I think so," he sighed back, feeling foolish for whispering. It took a second's glance around to locate the car, a black Acura well-back in the trees. Its trunk stood open. "That's Leland's," she told him.

"Okay, you're waiting here."

The simple announcement shocked her. "_No_, Greg – you've said yourself he might be dangerous –"

"Look." He met her eyes. "I think Palmer was abused by someone as a child. I want to talk to him alone." He saw her take in the implications. When she finally spoke it was not a question.

"You don't even know why you're really here, do you, Greg?"

"No. Or rather I'm - not sure. I just know I have to go in alone." Unwillingly she nodded.

The crumbling steps were a bitch to negotiate with his cane. The door to the lodge stood open a crack. Swinging it open he felt the sun behind him should have illuminated the room more; the stubborn dark inside seemed adhered to the odd smell, rot and a whiff of something he associated with danger, though he had no time to think of what it might be because Leland Palmer was sitting at a rickety table in the corner, smiling at him.

Palmer had his Italian suit on. He sat with one arm stretched out on the table, hand curled as though around a glass though there was nothing there. There was little in the room apart from the table: a wood floor beneath a braided rug too old for color, a kitchenette in the form of a moldy ruin. A rocking chair in the far corner. A dusty red drape led off to what could only be a tiny bedroom alcove. The space was smaller than it had appeared from outside. Close, sucking the breath out of him.

"Leland. Fancy meeting you here."

The lawyer showed no surprise at his presence. "Would you like to sit down?" There was no second chair at the table.

"I'll stand. Pain is character-forming."

"You know, this is where it happened." For a second only, he thought Palmer meant Laura's death, and his eyes snapped to the floor and faded walls for blood stains, but that crime scene had been found, Hayward had told him, an abandoned train car near the falls back in Twin Peaks; the gory details left unsaid had pressed tears into the old doctor's eyes. Palmer spoke again. "Right here." His voice might have been that of a tour guide, neutral to the content, laced with just enough enthusiasm to stir his bored audience. The room held no sign of the events in its past, or that it had been disturbed at all in the forty years since. Dust lay cold and waiting.

"Leland, you – have a problem. There are people who can help you." He had planned nothing, he realized, the icy knot in his stomach making him sound like a bad actor in a soap opera. What Amalie had said was true: he had no idea why he was here. "People who will help you remember, and – and then forget again." Why did the room have to stay so dark? "Drugs that will make you feel better. Believe me, I know."

Palmer frowned. "But I remember everything. I wouldn't forget you-" He turned to the empty rocking chair in the corner with a half-smile. "–would I?" He seemed to listen to the chair for a moment, then added: "No, Dr. House understands."

It took all his will not to back toward the door. His hands were sweating. "There's no one there, Leland," he murmured.

Palmer turned back. "Oh I know." The lawyer's palm covered his heart as though making a pledge. "He's in here." His face seemed to crumble, glassy eyes abruptly full of tears. "He has been for a long time." His hand thumped his chest twice, hard, pumping out words that were sobs. "I - I opened up, you see, and he – he came inside me." His smile, framed by two tears rolling down his cheeks, was beatific. "He became a part of me and it was good. It happened right here."

_He came inside me_. "That's why this is not a good place for you to be." His hand tightened on his cane.

"Oh yes it is. Don't you see?" With a theatrical gesture, one arm spread, half-lifting off his chair, Palmer burst into song, a wavering baritone. "_Ooh_ say can't you _seee_, by the dawn's early _liight_," then collapsed again, giggling. "I came here to do something."

_Haldol, midazolam, propofol_. Nonsense syllables that floated through his hyped mind because he had none of those sedatives with him, hadn't planned for the contingency of Palmer being truly demented; like all the rest, he saw now, he had been manipulated, drawn to a place where he had no options, no knock-out drug other than his cane which he gripped hard. His heart beat so fast it hurt. Could have gone for an anxiolytic himself, slow that heart down. His left hand twitched at his pocket, wanting one of his babies, then froze as Palmer's quick gaze followed it animal-like. How did they say you could calm the bad ones, stay non-verbal, nod and smile, but he couldn't stop his mouth, never had been able to.

"Something terrible happened to you, Leland, when you were a child." Palmer, or whatever looked out through him, watched him with bright eyes. "Your six-year old loonytune world went bad. Not cartoon funtime anymore. Sylvester got Tweetie after all." Or was it Coyote eating the Roadrunner, a mess of blood and feathers in the sand? The picture Agent Cooper had shown him arose, the kidnapper's long gray hair wolflike. "You couldn't live with it - no child's soul could - and so you buried it very deep. You're not really remembering it right." _You don't remember it at all because the reality would hurt too much_. He pushed the thought down like unspewed vomit. "There's something called Stockholm Syndrome, Leland. If someone hurts us enough, in a situation in which we are completely in their power" (_us, we_, what a stupid way to talk), "we begin to identify with them, we tell ourselves we love them. Children are particularly susceptible. We submerge ourselves…" He trailed off, a sudden pain between his eyes. His mouth tasted of acid. "This –" A name floated up, but it was the wrong one, then he had it. "This…Bob." At the name Palmer shook all over, a second-long pulse running through him, more frightening than his words or his glassy eyes. "He brought you up here and he took your childhood to hell with him–"

"Oh, I had a happy childhood, Dr. House." Neutral again, perfectly convinced. "Laura had a happy childhood. It wasn't me, you know, any more than it was me who pulled the trigger on Agent Cooper or held the pillow over Renault's face. _I_ didn't hurt Laura." Palmer's voice broke, dropped down to a stammered whisper. "_He_ wanted someone new. I was running down inside, too old for him. He thought he could…transfer." He giggled and touched his silk tie in a lawyerly straightening gesture. "Laura was going to be my legal successor."

_Please_. Please get me out of this. The pain behind his eyes left him weak. He imagined turning, limping out; it didn't translate into motion.

Palmer's gaze had grown sad again. "But it didn't work that way. Laura wouldn't let him in. All the years he tried and, well, physically of course…" He looked straight at his visitor, so lucid, and then he winked. "…it worked. But of course that's not what _he_ wanted. He wanted her soul, but she hid that from him. Every time. Just went away from what was being done to her body. My smart little girl. How many times I've done that for clients. Stashed assets away in an offshore account, where no one can get at them. Laura would have made a good lawyer." The father broke through Palmer's schizoid voice again, a hint of sob alternating with the sneer, the selves inside him battling. "All those times she fought." Hearing it he felt sick. "At the end she fought, Dr. House. You can't imagine."

"Don't need to. I saw Ronette Pulaski."

Palmer's head jerked. "The other girl shouldn't have been there. It was chance."

"Chance that she escaped from the train car halfway through. While you were busy with Laura." While Bob was busy. Don't say it. Subscribe to the idea of demons and you're lost.

"He did such terrible things." As though Palmer read his mind. "It wasn't me – oh Laura it wasn't!" The sudden wail was shockingly loud in the small space.

"The man who held you here when you were so young, Leland – he warped you –"

"Ah, who's warped here?" Palmer's red-rimmed eyes landed on the cane. The sneer was back. "Who did things to you, huh?"

"This was from an infarction five years ago." Confusion added to the pain in his head. "It didn't happen in my childhood, Leland." Pain that was spreading to his hands and feet as Palmer grinned at him, making his scar wake up, the worst kind of pain (and he knew so many), someone taking a sledge-hammer to his thigh – "My childhood –" he gasped, and it made him grab at his leg, _not now, why now_ –

Palmer stood up and the suddenness of it made him step back, almost crying out as he came down on the wrong leg. Every pore crawled with adrenaline.

"_He_ did things to you, didn't he, Dr. House?"

"No." Why answer the question of a madman, why fumble with the _he_ as though it meant anything, a hot spot at that place between your eyes –

Palmer turned away, surprisingly, and strode to the red-draped alcove at the back of the room. As he did, he threw over his shoulder, casually: "What did daddy do to you? Huh?"

- the pain that had floated back up into his head, suffusing it. "My father-"

"Did he hold a pillow over your face?"

The blast of acid memory staggered him. The pain was like a fist driven into his nose, the black place in his brain exploding; he thought he tasted blood in his throat, but that was impossible, as impossible as it was for the man now drawing back the drape from the bedroom to know things about him he had forgotten himself until that second, a scene buried so deep it might have happened to someone else; he lay on the old blue couch and his dad, pissed once again about something even more completely forgotten, held him while he fought against the silver couch pillow at his nose and mouth, the pillow he could never look at again after that afternoon. Only removing it after he had passed out, the ceiling with its gray stain shaped like Hawaii swimming back into view moments later. His father, showing him what power was… A sound escaped him now, a gasp between _no_ and _aah_. So impossible for Palmer to know, that it took every thought from him. He watched them drain away through the pain, leaving his mind blank and useless.

Palmer leaned into the bedroom, holding back the drape. The part of his bruised brain still working noted the golf-bag revealed on the floor there, too lumpy to hold golf-clubs. He'd been around enough body-bags to know one. Laura's cousin, the missing girl. Maggie, no – Maddy.

He felt his mouth open at the sight, needing air, punched by terror again, this time in the stomach; oh what a coward he was physically, just a wuss, a smart-mouth around authority, cops or a boss with a low neckline, brave enough when the lunatic in front of him had been strapped down by guys bigger than him, but shaking now as the full realization of what he faced hit him, not a father gone bad but a seriously deranged serial killer. He couldn't take his eyes off the golf-bag, his mind trying to crawl out of itself and take him over, make him run (_daddy_), insanity its own authority, one that would brook no backtalk (_you stand right there and wait for it_). He heard himself say, "Gone from plastic to golf bags now, Leland?", but it was barely a croak, the nightmare scream trapped in the dreamer's throat, too quiet for Palmer to even hear.

The lawyer had turned back from the alcove, the object he had reached for weighing down his arm (but it wasn't what he thought, no it couldn't be that), and began to sing tunelessly. "_Oh yes there's something I came here to do_." It was a gas can, the warning smell of danger that had wafted earlier from behind the drape strong now, and Palmer sang as he poured gas in every-widening circles around himself, the drape, the rocking chair, happily splashing the braided rug and the wooden baseboards in the kitchenette.

The lawyer was a magician now; in the hand he had held cupped, a book of matches appeared. He peeled one off –

_move go run scream_

- and lit it, then paused, an eagle gaze on his paralyzed visitor, inquisitive, casually turning back to their conversation as though it had been about the weather. "Your daddy -"

_Leland, don't_. Not even a dream gasp anymore, only a cry inside him (_daddy don't_).

"He burned you," the lawyer said (_Ronette said_). "Didn't he?"

The killer stood close to him now (when had that happened?), the flame a glowing ball eating the match down toward his manicured fingers. Palmer leaned in and touched his cane, held the flame down near his thigh where his scar throbbed beneath the cloth of his pants and he couldn't _move_, _couldn't_ run, because that would make the punishment worse when he was caught he would be still and good and not scream –

"You wanna play with fire –"

- because those words meant it was cigarette time

" - Son?"

It was his father's voice.

He remembered everything.

In the room you never visit the junk has accumulated on the floor because the items there are too disturbing to touch, pillows and cigarettes and a hand that holds your head underwater in an ice-bath. There is a smell of old blood. Something dark in the corner. Stacy asking _Was your father strict?_ He stood in the room and his father stood with him, tall and Marine-strong, lighting a Pall Mall with his square metal lighter, taking a pull until the end glowed, saying Wanna play with fire? and he was shaking because it was time, his little-boy legs that stuck out of his shorts trembling (_and yet whole, scarless_). You wanna play with fire, son? It was the worst memory, rightly occupying center-place in this room of forgotten scenes around the corner in his mind, the moment that had seemed hours, held half upside-down while the cigarette was applied to his thigh and he had screamed, though he wasn't supposed to, over and over. (Years later they would say We'll cut this leg off and not even Stacy would guess his mad refusal was some twisted need, an almost subconscious idea that he had to hang on to the evidence, the tiny faded scar she had never asked about and which had been debrided along with the rest of his skin there and thrown away while he lay in a coma). In other corners of the room, other boys writhed and wailed. One stood silent, hands pressed to unseen glass, his lips and eyelids blue, locked out in the winter night in his Batman pyjamas, and knowing now what he did of hypothermia, the brain's icy shutdown, he watched the boy turn away and lie down in the snow because it was warm, moments before his sobbing mother ran out and brought him in. Another struggled against the silver pillow (and how prescient of Bob to have killed Renault that way and let him find the corpse; the demon's inside joke). In the far corner a naked boy was getting his face pressed into the pile of clothes he'd just taken off while his father told him he would learn never to wet himself again.

Was your father strict?

My father had something in him. The realization burst in him. Watching the scenes with adult eyes, correlating them to tales he had told himself in order to survive, of accidents and momentary, forgivable flashes of anger, he saw: the unforgivable, the demon hidden behind the strictness, between the belt whippings spread-eagle on the bed for the least infraction – the smothering, drowning, burning hate that was Bob in his father, Bob, who had come up out of the ground and traveled with them to Japan and Egypt and everywhere the military had taken them, but that was ridiculous. Not demons then, but only the exudation of the ground, roots that twisted up into the adults who took their pain out on those smaller, the children that were like helpless animals they could throw and hit and hurt. Cooper had seen a giant and a midget. It was what evil was all about. The large devouring the small, and when they couldn't stand what they had done to the children, they would wrap them in hides or plastic and send them over the falls, just get rid of them, call it strictness or I-lost-control, let them grow up and pretend to forget and become the adults who did the same things to their own children.

It was no one's fault (_my father abused me_), it couldn't be stopped (_he burned me for life_), could it?

Wake up.

He came to in time to see Palmer spin, laughing, and toss the match into the pool of gas.

"_No!_"

The concussion sucked the air from the room. A ball of heat scorched past him, out the open front door. It was the only thing that saved them. He dropped to the floor, losing his cane. Palmer, closer to the back where the poured gas had concentrated, bellowed and laughed as the first white heat settled to flames that moved like a fast-forward film, scampering up the rotten drape and leaping across the rug. He tried to turn and crawl, his leg beating a rhythm of pain, managed to stand, half-bent – and found that Palmer had outflanked him. The lawyer stood at the front door. He looked like someone else. Face red-gleaming, the madman slammed the door shut and turned the key in a padlock that had been hidden from sight.

"No, it all goes!" Palmer crooned. "You'll be happy too – we'll forget it all together!"

"Give me the key, Leland!"

With a joyful skip the lawyer threw the key high overhead. He watched it arc into the center of the fire.

A crash sounded through the roaring flames. Cabinets in the kitchen, loosed from their burning struts, bowed forward and fell. Through streaming eyes he saw that the ceiling had caught fire.

_You are going to die_. A coughing fit took him. He was on his knees again. The ugly little room - so dark because of the boarded windows, he grasped belatedly – would be the last thing he saw in his life. Ugly end to an ugly life. Not Amalie's adoring face, not the face of anyone who cared a shit about him and which he might have deserved for trying to do right in life, Wilson's crooked trying-not-to-smile smile he suddenly yearned to see again, no, just the horrible room burning and Palmer, nutty as a diarrhetic squirrel's ass, who had left the door to waltz in the middle of the room while his silk suit lit up like a circus act. The last thing he would see.

The thought steeled him.

He stood and lunged against the door. Yanked at the padlock, hoping rotted wood had loosened the strike-plate from which it hung. The roaring in his ears was deafening. Palmer was abruptly beside him, pushing him from the door, kicking his thigh so that he screamed, and they fought. Someone was yelling his name. A pounding sounded through the roar of flame. Fists beating on the door.

"Greg? _Greg?!_"

"Am! He's locked the do-" Palmer's punch knocked his head against the floor. The room blurred.

"They can't stop us from choosing death!" the lawyer yowled.

He couldn't see. Palmer sat atop his chest, a howling weight, then his blindly groping hand closed on something thin beside him, his cane, and he swung it up in a desperate arc. It met his attacker's head with a whack and the howling stopped. Palmer slumped.

He shoved the limp body from him and scrambled to the door, calling for her to try and pull boards from a window, but he could hear no answer. Gone, deserted, didn't she know there was no time to get help, only seconds left. The heat was like a boiling cloth over his head and face; when he breathed, a wall devoid of air stuck in his throat and he got down and rasped in the cooler air near the floor, the last inch of oxygen left in the room. He could see Palmer on his back nearby; as he watched, the man gasped once, exactly like a beached fish, agonal breathing which meant the lunatic's heart had stopped, _can't stop thinking like a doctor even when you're dying, can you?,_ then – impossibly – the lawyer's eyes opened and he stood.

Impossible because cardiac arrest didn't reboot itself and he couldn't have mistaken the gasp. Palmer lurched toward him. The guy's eyeballs had to be cooking up there. Black polished stones that he saw now had always reminded him of his father's. He wanted to laugh or cry – he would be strangled by a madman after all instead of by smoke inhalation. He lay with his back to the door, oddly calm, waiting for Palmer's hair up there to burst into flames–

The door at his back shuddered.

He cried out, and heard Amalie's shout. Another thud rocked the door. Shards of wood flew inward, and he saw the edge of the axe she must have retrieved from the woodpile. _Yes, my smart girl._ He heaved himself to his feet, crying out at the heat on his face. "Hit the hinges!" he yelled to her. Palmer grabbed his waist and he jabbed backward with his elbows, finding ribs that gave way. The next blow of the axe tore the top hinge from the frame and the door sagged in toward them. He ducked as the fire, finding an exit, whooshed over their heads through the open space. Behind him Palmer shrieked and spun away.

_Not dying today_. Through the partly collapsed door he could see Amalie's terrified determined face. The space was still too narrow for him to fit through. She brought the axe up and then down again, and the head, too rusted to hold, flew off the handle.

"No!" she wailed.

He levered his cane into the slats and pried, the brass head searing his palm this time for real, and the last boards gave way, then he was stumbling with her down the stoop and across the yard, suddenly aware of his leg again, pain so vivid it was like running on a fractured femur, and he realized he might still pass out, that she would never be able to drag his body far enough away in time. He tripped and the ground came up to meet him. His face lay in mud. She was hitting him, frustrated swats on his back and shoulders (why did women always hit like that?), then he understood that his clothes were smoldering. He crawled to a puddle left by the rain and rolled in it, then collapsed.

He lay still for a moment, letting his mouth breathe in the soil and cold grass that meant he was alive. Fresh sweet earth, no demons there. They had never come from there in the first place.

The lodge exploded, a new burst of flame taking the roof, and Amalie gasped. We're out of range, he wanted to tell her. He managed to sit up, and saw what she had seen.

"Who…?" she cried.

The figure standing amid the flames writhed and stumbled. For a second only he thought he saw a beak-nosed face, long gray hair, and he told himself that Palmer, at the last second struck by sanity, had thrown a rag over his head, then the rest of the roof collapsed, burying the figure and razing what remained of the lodge. Black smoke billowed up past the treetops.

Through his scorched throat he could barely speak. "Time for a road trip," he told Amalie. "Those smoke signals will bring out the pale-faces any minute now."

Moaning, she helped him to the car and took the driver's seat. The careening ride down the narrow road was almost as scary as the fire, but he wasn't about to tell her to slow down. Where the bottom exited onto the main road, she took the opposite direction from Pearl Lake and drove until a disused rest-stop loomed, a pocket of shadows in the trees, and she pulled off, out of sight of the road, still shaking. He was still adrenaline-pumped himself. In the distance a siren blared.

"Even if it's just an anonymous call," she said, "we should tell someone what happened."

"I don't think we can." She seemed to understand what he meant. "They'll identify Leland's body themselves." And the girl's. He stared away at the firs, until their breathing had quieted and the siren had grown distant again, turning away up toward the lodge. "He talked about my father." He felt her listening. "Sometime soon I need to tell you about something I remembered while I was in there." He turned to meet her wide eyes. "We've both gone through hell long enough, Am. Telling ourselves we were at fault for what other people did to us. For things that happened beyond our control. I wasn't a rotten kid that deserved everything I got. And you didn't kill your baby." She covered her mouth and buried her head against his muddy chest, but he could feel her nod. "Now drive."

He watched her pull back onto the main road, her jaw set with determination. Her hair was down, tangled, her face sooty and bleeding from a scratch. She looked wild, but then he probably looked like he'd stuck his finger in an electric socket himself. They would have to do some explaining just to get a key to a gas-station restroom and wash up. She had said they were broken, he recalled, and they were. Broken and cracked in a hundred places, reforming again and again until they were nothing but fault lines, but somehow the stronger for it.

The turn-off to Twin Peaks drew near ahead and she took her foot off the gas long enough to glance at him, his acknowledging nod, and then she gunned past it, going east. The firs zipping by threw strips of light and dark across them like cage bars until they were well out of the woods.

………………………………………………………………………………

End of Story


End file.
